INVESTIGATING THE INFLUENCE OF SIMPLIFIED VERSUS DETAILED SOIL MAPS ON THE PERFORMANCE OF A SEMI-DISTRIBUTEDHYDROLOGICAL MODEL

摘要

The FORWARD project is developing a range of hydrological models for investigating theimpacts of forestry operations on water yield and quality from watersheds on the Canadian Boreal Plain.One of the models developed as part of FORWARD is SWATBF. It is a semi-distributed model that relieson a number of data sets including land use, soils and weather. The original soils map developed forFORWARD contained more than 1300 soil types and was deemed to be too complex for managementpurposes. Therefore, a simplified soils map was developed with only seven soil classes. This studyinvestigated whether using a simplified soils map in SWATBF would produce results equivalent to using adetailed soils map. The results indicate that the performance of SWATBF using a simplified soils map wasvery similar as when a detailed soils map was used. This is an important finding because there are anumber of advantages associated with using a simpler soils map.