Effects of forest vegetation on runoff and sediment transport of watershed in Loess area, west China

Abstract

This paper aims to study the effects of vegetation on runoff and sediment transport at the watershed scale, and to provide a theoretical basis for afforestation in the Loess area, in the nested Caijiachuan watershed, Jixian County, Shanxi Province of west China. Forest watersheds and farmland watersheds with similar terrain features were selected through cluster analysis to study their runoff and sediment transport characteristics. Results showed that compared with farmland watersheds, runoff generation time in forest watersheds was delayed remarkably, and peak flow was reduced greatly, which indicates that vegetation played an important role in holding and absorbing rainfall. Besides, with the increase of forest coverage, the runoff amount, runoff depth and runoff coefficient decreased during the rainy seasons. The runoff depth and runoff coefficient of farmland watersheds in the rainy season were 5 20-fold as much as that of forest watersheds, and runoff and sediment yield of watersheds with low forest coverage were 2.7 2.9-fold and 3 6-fold as great as those with high coverage during rainstorms, and low forest coverage had larger variation in sediment hydrograph. For the complexity and scale dependence of the influence of forest vegetation on runoff, forest hydrological functions based on regional scale or watershed scale were worthy of further studies.