Abstract
Suspended sediment concentration of a river can provide very important perspective on erosion or soil loss of one river basin ecosystem. The changes of land use and land cover, such as deforestation or afforestation, affect sediment yield process of a catchment through changing the hydrological cycle of the area. A sediment rating curve can describe the average relation between discharge and suspended sediment concentration for a certain location. However, the sediment load of a river is likely to be undersimulated from water discharge using least squares regression of log-transformed variables and the sediment rating curve does not consider temporal changes of vegetation cover. The Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) can well be used to analyze the status of the vegetation cover well. Thus long time monthly NDVI data was used to detect vegetation change in the past 19 years in this study. Then monthly suspended sediment concentration and discharge from 1988 to 2006 in Laichau station were used to develop one new sediment rating curve and were validated in other Asian basins. The new sediment model can describe the relationship among sediment yield, streamflow, and vegetation cover, which can be the basis for soil conservation and sustainable ecosystem management.
Highlights
The issue of soil erosion and sediment load of the watershed is one of the hot spots, which currently causes the global widespread attention
The new curve can describe the relationship among sediment yield, streamflow, and vegetation cover, which can be the basis for soil conservation and sustainable ecosystem management
In order to check out the limitation of common sediment rating curve, common sediment rating curve was first applied in Da River Basin (Figure 4)
Summary
The issue of soil erosion and sediment load of the watershed is one of the hot spots, which currently causes the global widespread attention. River sediment load is affected by climate change land cover change within its drainage basin in an integrated way [1, 2]. With the increase of population and rapid development of economics and society, human activities have been seriously affecting the watershed land cover, which in turn affect sediment yield response of a catchment through modifying the surface gradient, surface roughness, and soil erodibility [3]. In the face of intricate impacts from recent environmental changes, it is becoming a more complicated problem to calculate and evaluate sediment loads especially for basins with limited data.
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