With extraordinary resolution and accuracy, Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR)-derived digital elevation models (DEMs) have been increasingly used for watershed analyses and modeling by hydrologists, planners and engineers. Such high-accuracy DEMs have demonstrated their effectiveness in delineating watershed and drainage patterns at fine scales in low-relief terrains. However, these high-reso...

[1] A new global optimization algorithm, dynamically dimensioned search (DDS), is introduced for automatic calibration of watershed simulation models. DDS is designed for calibration problems with many parameters, requires no algorithm parameter tuning, and automatically scales the search to find good solutions within the maximum number of user-specified function (or model) evaluations. As a re...

The Conservation Effects Assessment Project was established to quantify water quality benefits of conservation practices supported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). In 2004, watershed assessment studies were begun in fourteen agricultural watersheds with varying cropping systems, landscapes, climate, and water quality concerns. This paper reviews USDA Agricultural Research Service '...

This corrects the article "Assessment of Water Cycle in Agricultural Watershed Based on Canal Network Modeling" page 33.

The objective of this study was to evaluate the impact of rapidly changing land use on erosion and sedimentation in a mixed land use watershed in the Ozark Highlands of the USA. The research combines a geographic information system-based soil erosion modeling approach with land use change detection to quantify the influence of changing land use on erosion risk. Five land use/land cover maps wer...

The Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) nitrogen (N) water quality model considers the artificial inputs associated with human activities, including point and nonpoint source pollution loads. Although SWAT has the ability to simulate atmospheric N deposition and fixation, they were not considered in the modeling research. N deposition from the air is an important and considerable pathway for ...

Pay-for-performance (PFP) is a relatively new approach to agricultural conservation that attaches an incentive payment to quantified reductions in nutrient runoff from a participating farm. Similar to a payment for ecosystem services approach, PFP lends itself to providing incentives for the most beneficial practices at the field level. To date, PFP conservation in the U.S. has only been applie...

Digital hydrologic networks depicting surface-water pathways and their associated drainage catchments provide a key component to hydrologic analysis and modeling. Collectively, they form common spatial units that can be used to frame the descriptions of aquatic and watershed processes. In addition, they provide the ability to simulate and route the movement of water and associated constituents ...

Management decisions related with water quality in lakes and reservoirs require a combined land-water processes study approach. This study reports on an integrated watershed-reservoir modeling methodology: the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model to estimate the nutrient input loads from the watershed, used afterwards as boundary conditions to the reservoir model, CE-QUAL-W2. The integra...

Topography is a crucial surface characteristic in soil erosion modeling. Soil erosion studies use a digital elevation model (DEM) to derive the topographical characteristics of a study area. Majority of the times, a DEM is incorporated into erosion models as a given parameter and it is not tested as extensively as are the parameters related to soil, land-use and climate. This study compares ero...