Applying the Soil and Water Assessment Tool Model for Integrated Lake Basin Management in Northern Vietnam: Case Study of the Thac Ba Reservoir Basin
13/09/21 03:35PM
Tue Ngoc Nguyen, Truong Xuan Nguyen, Tien Van Pham, et al. Environmental Engineering Science, 2021.
Abstract:
Recent land use changes in the form of deforestation, agricultural
development, industrialization, and urbanization have caused water
quality and quantity problems in many watersheds in Vietnam
necessitating the development of appropriate policy interventions.
This research explores the possibility of using a coupled Geographic
Information System and hydrological model (Soil and Water Assessment
Tool [SWAT]) to assess the impact of land use changes on stream flows in
the Thac Ba reservoir basin in the Northern Vietnam
in three different land use change scenarios: expansion of forest lands,
return to the nature, and expansion of the urban area. The
Nash-Sutcliffe Efficiencies of 0.895 and 0.869 were obtained after the
calibration and validation processes, respectively. The
nutrient and sediment loadings are currently being assessed pending the
acquisition of observed data and model calibration. Further studies will
be conducted to have a look at the likely effects of climate changes on
the water quality and quantity of the Thac
Ba reservoir as well as providing an insight of how the SWAT model for
the Thac Ba reservoir basin can be applied to the much larger and
nationally more important basin, the HoaBinh reservoir basin which
provides drinking water to the capital Hanoi. According
to the scenarios of land use change conditions, an increasing trend in
stream flow may be expected in the next decades caused by increasing
rainfall amounts. Therefore, flooding and the reduced reservoir capacity
are major problems in the target area, and
there must be improvement of watershed management by applying the
Integrated Lake Basin Management concept.
