Evaluating the impacts of sustainable land management practices on water quality in an agricultural catchment in Lower Austria using SWAT.

Managing agricultural watersheds in an environmentally friendly manner necessitate the strategic implementation of well-targeted sustainable land management (SLM) practices that limit soil and nonpoint source pollution losses and translocation. Watershed-scale SLM-scenario modeling has the potential to identify efficient and effective management strategies from the field to the integrated landscape level. In a case study targeting a 66-hectare watershed in Petzenkirchen, Lower Austria, the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) was utilized to evaluate a variety of locally adoptable SLM practices.

Long-term data from field erosion plot studies in eastern Austria.

Soil erosion and runoff data are collected at three sites in eastern Austria using field erosion plots. Observed treatments include 1) conventional tillage with plough (CT), 2) mulch tillage with winter cover crop (MT), and 3) no-till with winter cover crop (NT). Data cover a time span from 1994 to 2018.

Comparison of three types of laser optical disdrometers under natural rainfall conditions.

Optical disdrometers can be used to estimate rainfall erosivity; however, the relative accuracy of different disdrometers is unclear. This study compared three types of optical laser-based disdrometers to quantify differences in measured rainfall characteristics and to develop correction factors for kinetic energy (KE). Two identical PWS100 (Campbell Scientific), one Laser Precipitation Monitor (Thies Clima) and a first-generation Parsivel (OTT) were collocated with a weighing rain gauge (OTT Pluvio) at a site in Austria.

Effect of land use-land cover change on the regimes of surface runoff-the case of Lake Basaka catchment (Ethiopia).

In this study, the effect of land use-land cover change (LULCC) on surface (direct) runoff was estimated for Lake Basaka catchment using the soil conservation services-curve number model in the geospatial information system (ArcInfo), assisted by remote sensing. The result indicated that Lake Basaka catchment experienced a significant LULCC. About 86% of forest coverage and 46% of grasslands were lost over the study period (1973-2015), which were shifted to open bushy woodlands, farms, lake water and wetlands.