Water flow model on vegetated hillslopes with erosion

TL;DR

This paper develops a mathematical model combining water flow and soil erosion equations to analyze how plant cover influences water dynamics and soil erosion on vegetated hillslopes, with applications to flood and erosion management.

Contribution

It introduces an extended Saint-Venant model coupled with Hairsine-Rose equations that accounts for plant presence, providing a flexible tool for simulating water-soil-plant interactions.

Findings

Plant cover significantly alters water flow patterns.

The model can simulate flood and erosion scenarios.

Numerical experiments show quantitative effects of vegetation.

Abstract

The water circulation in the Soil-Plant-Atmosphere continuum and particularly the soil erosion induced by water are problems of main concern in the new era of climate change. The present paper aims to provide a mathematical tool to investigate the water-soil and water-plant interactions involved in the complex process of water flow on plant-covered soil surfaces. Basically, the mathematical model consists of an extended Saint-Venant system of equations for water flow coupled with Hairsine-Rose equations for soil erosion. The classical Saint-Venant model is thus modified in order to take into account the presence of plants on the soil surface. On the premise that the model adequately reflects the essence of the reality, a series of numerical experiments are performed to analyze the plant induced effects on water dynamics and soil erosion intensity. Given that both, the mathematical model and the accompanying software are flexible enough to reflect the variability of the environmental variables such as soil structure, soil surface roughness, or plant cover structure, each numerical experiment is constructed as an image of a target hydrological context. The dam break problem, flash floods, water-induced soil erosion in a catchment basin are all subjects of numerical analysis. It is shown that the presence of the plant cover drastically modifies the water dynamics and the distribution of the soil eroded particles and one can quantitatively evaluate such effects. The methods described in the paper can also help one to manage the environmental resources in order to avoid the water induced disasters.