Modelling the impact of land cover changes in the Czech Republic on sediment delivery

Abstract

At present large collective fields in the Czech Republic are being split up into smaller spatial units. Moreover, a large number of former state farms are abandoned, resulting in an increase of the area of set-aside land. Between 1990 and 2000 the area of pasture land in the Czech Republic increased 150%. The ongoing landscape dynamics has a significant impact on soil erosion and sediment delivery to rivers and reservoirs. In some cases sedimentation records in retention ponds at the outlet of rural drainage basins show a 75% decrease of the mean annual sediment export since 1990. It may be expected that the EU enlargement will be a significant driver for future land cover change in Central and Eastern Europe. In this paper some possible land cover change scenarios for rural areas in the Czech Republic were considered. Next, these scenarios were used as an input for a spatially distributed sediment delivery model in order to evaluate their impact on soil erosion and sediment delivery. The results show that the spatial pattern of land cover change seems to be more important than the percentage of land cover change, which encourages the development and application of spatially explicit land cover change models.