An Integrated Modelling Approach Inmountainous Watershed of Heihe River Basin, Northwest China

Abstract

An integrated modelling approach is developed to simulate ecological economics processes of mountainous watershed of Heihe river basin, northwest China. The objectives are 1) a hydrologic unit model HLM_HMU was developed; 2) the impacts of LUCC on the hydrological processes based on different scenarios were simulated respectively; and 3) the Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) curve of prohibition grazing is given. The hydrological results show that the observed and simulated data have a good fit, in which the Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency, balance error, and explained variance are 0.69, - 0.13, and 0.62, respectively; the model can simulate the majority of peaks well; the source code of Spatial Modelling Environment (SME) needs to be deeply understood to improve the algorithms of interpolation and conflux; the PES result shows that prohibition grazing will occur completely when the price of PES reached to 17.42 yuan, and the increased amount of ecosystem services is 2.13 × 10 8 m 3 .The main purpose of this paper is to build a better understanding of developing a meaningful integr ated model in the study area to solve its ecological and economic problems.