Bridging rigorous assessment of water availability from field to catchment scale with a parsimonious agro-hydrological model

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsoft.2017.02.014Get rights and content

Highlights

  • AquaCrop-Hydro extends AquaCrop with a conceptual hydrological model.

  • AquaCrop-Hydro requires a limited amount of data and calibration.

  • AquaCrop-Hydro accurately predicts crop production and river discharge.

  • Overland flow is predicted less accurate due to the model's daily time step.

  • AquaCrop-Hydro is expected to be widely applicable.

Abstract

While simple crop and hydrological models are limited with respect to the number and accuracy of the processes they incorporate, complex models have high demand for data. Due to the limitations of both categories of models, there is a need for new agro-hydrological models that simulate both crop productivity and water availability in agricultural catchments, with low data and calibration requirements. This study aimed at developing a widely applicable parsimonious agro-hydrological model, AquaCrop-Hydro, which couples the AquaCrop crop water productivity model with a conceptual hydrological model. AquaCrop-Hydro, simulating crop productivity, the daily soil water balance and discharge at the catchment outlet, performed well for an agricultural catchment in Belgium. The model can be used to investigate the effect of agricultural management and environmental changes from field to catchment scale in support of sustainable water management in agricultural areas.

Introduction

Crop simulation models integrate various processes in the soil-crop-atmosphere continuum that determine crop growth and production. Hence, they are useful tools to investigate management strategies to optimize crop productivity and resource use efficiency. Such investigations usually focus on one individual field because of the point-based nature of crop models. However, optimization of the use of resources, particularly water, is not a local issue. A management strategy that optimizes crop water productivity in one farmer's field, may only be successful if it does not negatively affect neighbouring farmers. On an even larger scale, agricultural water management affects a whole catchment where different stakeholders, including households, industry and ecosystems, with different goals are making use of the available water resources (Bergez et al., 2012). It is clear that management strategies that are optimized for crop water productivity by a crop model, may fail to result in sustainable water use because catchment processes are disregarded.

Hydrological models, by contrast, simulate hydrological processes in a catchment and simulate crop transpiration as a part of the catchment soil water balance. However, as these models primarily focus on the simulation of hydrological processes, they rarely consider crop growth and management practices affecting crop transpiration and production explicitly. The hydrological models that do include physically based equations to estimate crop transpiration, such as the (semi)-distributed SWAT (Arnold et al., 1998, Douglas-Mankin et al., 2010), MIKE SHE (Refsgaard and Storm, 1995) and APEX (Gassman et al., 2010) models, show relatively high computational complexity. Moreover, they require a vast amount of data and elaborate calibration, or make use of parameters that are difficult to measure in the field. Despite the trend to apply remote sensing data as input or calibration data for agro-hydrological models (Boegh et al., 2004, Moulin et al., 1998), data availability remains a widespread issue (Grayson et al., 2002). Consequently, the application of such data-demanding models renders time- and resource-consuming, or even unfeasible in data-scarce regions.

These limitations of existing crop and hydrological models urge for another approach. A coupling between both types of models, combining their advantages and functionality, can be a solution to obtain agro-hydrological models that (i) simulate crop production and water productivity at field scale, as well as upscale their effects on hydrological processes and water availability at catchment scale, (ii) consider the effect of management and environmental changes on crop transpiration, crop (water) productivity and catchment hydrological processes, (iii) are parsimonious, i.e. require a feasible amount of easily obtainable input data and parameters to be calibrated, without compromising much the accuracy of the model results, and (iv) are widely applicable to various agricultural catchments with different environmental and agronomic conditions.

Previous attempts have been made to couple crop and hydrological models to capitalize the strengths of both and enable accurate investigation of agricultural management and environmental changes within a catchment. The WOFOST crop model (Boogaard et al., 2014) has been coupled to MetaSWAP (van Walsum and Supit, 2012) and to the distributed WEP-L model (Jia, 2011) for climate change impact assessment. Also, the DAISY crop model (Abrahamsen and Hansen, 2000) has been combined with MIKE SHE for investigation of nitrogen fluxes in agricultural catchments (Styczen and Storm, 1993, Thorsen et al., 2001). DSSAT crop models (Jones et al., 2003) have been linked to hydrological models to optimize irrigation management and drainage design (McNider et al., 2014, Singh and Helmers, 2008). Also extensive modeling systems, which integrate all aspects, dimensions, scales and actors involved in agricultural management, link crop and hydrological models (Jakeman and Letcher, 2003, Letcher et al., 2006).

However, most of these model combinations fail to fit all four above mentioned criteria. Being based on the distributed physically based model MIKE SHE, high data requirements remain an issue for the DAISY-MIKE SHE model (Boegh et al., 2004, Thorsen et al., 2001). The same is true for agro-hydrological models based on the data-demanding DSSAT crop models (Jones et al., 2003) and the fully integrative modelling systems (Jakeman and Letcher, 2003). Moreover, when developed for a specific application, the existing model combinations are only applicable for a certain region or crop (McNider et al., 2014). Also, problems to accurately represent spatial heterogeneity within the catchment due to the fixed model structure or grid size of the sub-models should be mentioned (Bithell and Brasington, 2009, Thorsen et al., 2001).

Therefore, the aim of this study was to develop a parsimonious, physically sound and widely applicable agro-hydrological model, AquaCrop-Hydro, to simulate crop productivity and water availability in agricultural catchments without vast data requirements for model input and calibration. The new model was developed by extending the AquaCrop crop water productivity model (Hsiao et al., 2009, Raes et al., 2009, Steduto et al., 2009, Vanuytrecht et al., 2014a) with a lumped conceptual hydrological model to simulate catchment hydrology. The performance of AquaCrop-Hydro to simulate crop production as well as discharge at the catchment outlet was evaluated for an agricultural catchment in Belgium.

Section snippets

The AquaCrop-Hydro model

Fig. 1 depicts the AquaCrop-Hydro model flowchart. AquaCrop-Hydro is the combination of a crop model operating at field scale and a hydrological model working at catchment scale. The two models are integrated through an off-line, one-directional link, in which the crop model output is used as input for the hydrological model component. Model simulations are conducted on a daily time step.

AquaCrop-Hydro applies a semi-distributed approach, as it requires the catchment area to be divided into

Hydrological model parameters

Table 3 shows the seven hydrological model parameters as calibrated for the Plankbeek catchment. The calibrated deep percolation parameters resulted in a good match between the observed and simulated baseflow-interflow proportion. Comparison for all days with deep percolation resulted in a high R2 of 0.86. The recession constants were taken equal to values obtained when applying the WETSPRO filter (Table 2).

Crop production

Average simulated crop production matched well with the average crop yield reported for

Model approach

This study shows that AquaCrop-Hydro combines functionality of the parsimonious AquaCrop model and VHM conceptual hydrological model in order to upscale simulation of water availability from an individual field to a larger agricultural catchment.

AquaCrop-Hydro is able to simulate both crop (water) productivity as well as catchment hydrological processes. Due to the parsimonious nature of both sub-models, not all processes are described in a detailed physically based manner. Crop growth and

Conclusion

The AquaCrop-Hydro model, newly developed by coupling the crop simulation model AquaCrop to a conceptual hydrological model, is shown to be a parsimonious agro-hydrological model with wide potential application. Next to simulation of crop water productivity and production at field scale, AquaCrop-Hydro simulates the daily catchment soil water balance applying a semi-distributed approach. River discharge at the catchment outlet is simulated using a lumped conceptual hydrological model.

Software availability

The AquaCrop-Hydro model is a combination of the AquaCrop crop water productivity model and a lumped conceptual hydrological model. The latest version of the open access AquaCrop software (version 5.0), together with all information and training material, is freely available at: http://www.fao.org/nr/water/aquacrop.html. The standard AquaCrop software includes a graphical user-interface for data processing, running simulations and visualizing simulation results. The plug-in AquaCrop software,

Acknowledgements

This research was funded by the Research Foundation Flanders. We are grateful to Stien Keunen for helping to test and develop the AquaCrop-Hydro model. Moreover, we would like to thank Mattias Van Opstal, Toon Kerkhofs and Stefaan Dondeyne for their help with data collection. Furthermore, we are grateful for data and information that were provided by the Federal Public Service Economy (FOD economie), the Flemish Environment Agency (VMM), the Flemish Land Agency (VLM) and the Royal

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