Abstract
Check dams are among of the most widespread and effective engineering structures for conserving water and soil in the Loess Plateau since the 1950s, and have significantly modified the local hydrologic responses and landforms. A representative small catchment was chosen as an example to study the influences of check dams. A physics-based distributed model, the Integrated Hydrology Model (InHM), was employed to simulate the impacts of check dam systems considering four scenarios (pre-dam, single-dam, early dam-system, current dam-system). The results showed that check dams significantly alter the water redistribution in the catchment and influence the groundwater table in different periods. It was also shown that gully erosion can be alleviated indirectly due to the formation of the expanding sedimentary areas. The simulated residual deposition heights (Δh) matched reasonably well with the observed values, demonstrating that physics-based simulation can help to better understand the hydrologic impacts as well as predicting changes in sediment transport caused by check dams in the Loess Plateau.
Highlights
The Chinese Loess Plateau has suffered from severe water and soil loss for decades [1,2].Many measures, including artificial forestation, terraced farming, and check dam construction, have been implemented to conserve soil and water since the 1950s
Huang et al [14] evaluated the impacts of a 30-year-old check dam on water redistribution and the results showed that infiltration was enhanced in the sedimentary field
The EF values in the four calibration events were all higher than 0.70, and the model produced the best simulation results in event 4, which was characterized as low rainfall intensity and rainfall amount with low water and sediment discharges
Summary
The Chinese Loess Plateau has suffered from severe water and soil loss for decades [1,2].Many measures, including artificial forestation, terraced farming, and check dam construction, have been implemented to conserve soil and water since the 1950s. The Chinese Loess Plateau has suffered from severe water and soil loss for decades [1,2]. Loess Plateau 400 years ago, the effective engineering structure has prevailed all over the Loess Plateau, especially in the Loess Mesa Ravine Region and the Loess Hill Ravine Region, to create productive farmlands and conserve soil and water [3]. There were 122,028 check dams in the Loess Plateau at the end of 2005, which held 2.1 × 1010 m3 of sediments and formed 3340 km of dam farmlands [4,5]. Check dams have been shown to be an effective engineering structure to reduce water discharge [6,7] and sediment yields [8,9,10] at the basin scale. Xu et al [6] applied
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