Land leveling impact on surface runoff and soil losses: Estimation with coupled deterministic/stochastic models for a Québec agricultural field

Abstract

Land leveling impact on water quality had not received much attention for fields in humid continental climate. The objectives of this study were to isolate the impact of land leveling, performed on an agricultural field (Québec, Canada) in spring 2012, on runoff and TSS load and to make recommendations to attenuate adverse environmental impacts of land leveling, if any. A total of 66 runoff events, including 22 with total suspended sediments (TSS) load estimates, from 2010 to 2014 were analyzed. To this end, deterministic models were coupled to an adaptive Metropolis-Hastings algorithm to estimate the unknown distribution of the parameters representing the most important effects, namely land leveling, tillage, and crop cover. Simulated runoff events were generated by the hydrological model SWMM version 5 while simulated TSS loads were generated by an empirical equation based on the Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation version 2 (RUSLE2). Thanks to the algorithm used, it was demonstrated that land leveling significantly decreased total runoff volume at least for the two following years. The impact on peak flow was mixed: land leveling significantly decreased peak flow for a typical stratiform rainfall event but the effect was unclear for a typical convective rainfall event. Based on 90% confidence interval, TSS load increased from 10 to 1000 times immediately after land leveling (spring 2012) compared to pre-land leveling events. The TSS load increase remained significant one year after land leveling, with TSS loads 5–20 times higher compared to pre-land leveling events. It would thus be recommended to grow crops with high ground coverage ratios coupled with cover crops during the year when land leveling is done. Sediment retention structures could also be installed at the beginning of the land leveling process to provide protection against the short term and delayed impact on water quality.