| Title: | Assessing the risks of soil erosion and small reservoir siltation in a tropical river basin in Mali using the SWAT model under limited data condition |
| Authors: | Xie, H., E. Nkonya and B. Wielgosz |
| Year: | 2011 |
| Journal: | Applied Engineering in Agriculture |
| Volume (Issue): | 27(6) |
| Pages: | 895-904 |
| Article ID: | |
| DOI: | 10.13031/2013.40628 |
| URL (non-DOI journals): | |
| Model: | SWAT |
| Broad Application Category: | hydrologic and pollutant |
| Primary Application Category: | reservoirs, ponds, lakes and/or other impoundment effects |
| Secondary Application Category: | sediment loss and transport |
| Watershed Description: | 19,312 km^2 Banifing River, located in southern Mali. |
| Calibration Summary: | |
| Validation Summary: | |
| General Comments: | This paper is part of a special SWAT issue that includes 12 SWAT-related papers in Trans. ASABE 2011 Vol. 54(5) and four additional papers in Applied Engr. in Agricultural 2011 Vol. 27(6) |
| Abstract: | This article presents a modeling‐based assessment of soil erosion and small reservoir siltation risks in a
middle‐sized river basin in southern Mali, West Africa. An integrated watershed model, the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT), was applied to simulate the watershed hydrology and the sediment detachment and transport processes on land and in streams. According to the estimated land sediment yields and the reservoir lifespans, we concluded that soil erosion and reservoir siltation risks in the study river basin are not significant. The limited data availability posed challenges to the application of the SWAT model and lead to uncertainty in this study. The data available only allows for calibrating and evaluating the SWAT‐Banifing model in hydrologic simulation. However, it was found with the hydrologically‐calibrated SWAT model that the river system in the Banifing River basin is dominated by the combined baseflow and lateral flow. The low surface runoff intensity provides a possible causal and physical explanation for this study's findings, which were arrived at under circumstances in which there is a lack of monitoring data on sedimentation processes. |
| Language: | English |
| Keywords: | Erosion, Reservoir siltation, West Africa, SWAT, Water balance |