The results of distributed watershed models could be sensitive to spatial and temporal scales at which inputs and model parameters are aggregated. This paper reports findings of a detailed sensitivity analysis conducted on the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s distributed watershed simulation model, known as the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT). The Big Creek Watershed, located in southern ...

Several best management practices (BMPs) have been implemented through Water Quality Management Plans (WQMPs) in the West Fork Watershed of Trinity River Basin in Texas, USA, where nonpoint source pollution is a serious concern. Major sources of pollution are sediment erosion and nutrients. The objective of this study was to evaluate the long-term impact of implementation of WQMPs on nonpoint s...

Because hydrologic responses of an agricultural watershed are influenced by many natural and man-made factors including pond/reservoir, management practices, and/or irrigation/drainage, strategies of hydrological modeling for the watershed must be case-dependent and thus carefully designed to effectively reflect their roles as critical hydrologic components in simulation processes. In this stud...

This project outlines procedures and resources used on the construction of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) susceptibility model. The PAH susceptibility is due to PAH loading from impervious surface features in the watershed. The susceptibility model determines areas in the watershed which contribute to PAH loading. These hotspots represent areas that should be closely monitored, as they h...

Watershed is not simply the hydrological unit but also socio-political-ecological entity which plays crucial role in determining food, social, and economical security and provides life support services to rural people. The criteria for selecting watershed size also depend on the objectives of the development and terrain slope. A large watershed can be managed in plain valley areas or where fore...

In this paper, a formal de"nition and a new algorithmic technique for the watershed transformation is presented. The novelty of the approach is to adapt the connected component operator to solve the watershed segmentation problem. The resulting algorithm is independent of the number of grey-levels, employs simple data structures, requires less error prone memory management, and issues a lower c...

The watershed algorithm from mathematical morphology has recently become powerful tool for image segmentation. Image analysis has been used successfully in a number of applications to classify different features according to their relative scales. In this paper we present the multistage behavior of gradient watershed regions. Boundaries of gradient watershed regions correspond to the edges of o...

Soil moisture is an important factor for vegetation restoration and ecosystem sustainability in the Loess Plateau of China. The strong spatial heterogeneity of soil moisture is controlled by many environmental factors, including topography and land use. Moreover, the spatial patterns and soil hydrological processes depend on the scale of the site being investigated, which creates a challenge fo...

Across most of the World's coastal zone there has been a geographic transition from naturally vegetated to human-altered land covers, both agricultural and urban. This transition has increased the nitrogen loads to coastal watersheds, and from watersheds to receiving estuaries. We modeled the nitrogen entering the watershed of Waquoit Bay, Massachusetts, and found that as the transition took pl...

A watershed scale lumped parameter hydrology and water quality model that includes an uncertainty analysis component was developed and tested on a lower coastal plain watershed in North Carolina. Uncertainty analysis was used to determine the impacts of uncertainty in field and network parameters of the model on the predicted outflows and nitrate-nitrogen loads at the outlet of the watershed. T...