Abstract
Abstract. Land use scenarios are of primordial importance when implementing a hydrological model for the purpose of determining the future quality of water in a watershed. This paper provides the background for researching potential agricultural land use changes that may take place in a mesoscale watershed, for water quality research, and describes why studying the farm scale is important. An on-going study in Bavaria examining the local drivers of change in land use is described.
Highlights
Hydrological models necessitate a number of input parameters to perform adequate simulations
This paper provides the background for researching potential agricultural land use changes that may take place in a mesoscale watershed, for water quality research, and describes why studying the farm scale is important
Most land use models do not tend to examine the farm level (Overmars and Verburg, 2005; Houet et al, 2010), perhaps due to the required integration of social and physical sciences (Verburg et al, 2004) which is not undemanding, or because it is difficult to predict the evolution of crop land use at a watershed scale due to the complex relationships between producers and their management of land resources (Lambin et al, 2000), or because the spatial-temporal evolution of land-use is highly site-specific and difficult to draw out generalizations that can be plugged into a larger scale model
Summary
Hydrological models necessitate a number of input parameters to perform adequate simulations. When applying water quality models to primarily rural watersheds, agricultural land use should be represented in sufficient detail because this governs processes (i.e. surface runoff) which significantly influence sediment and nutrient transport. Our study undertakes an examination of the surface water quality in a future temporal frame while considering the possibility of an evolving landscape in the watershed, so that the relevant land cover and land use parameters can be adequately represented in the hydrological model. This paper will describe the concepts of agricultural land use modelling, with a particular focus on the farm level scale of modelling, and the drivers of cropping system change It will describe an on-going study in Bavaria examining the drivers of land use change at the farm level
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