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Assessing the Impact of Wildland Fire on Runoff and Erosion using the Automated Geospatial Watershed Assessment Tool
Citation:
Guertin, D., D. Goodrich, B. Sheppard, J. Barlow, T. Clifford, C. Unkrich, I. Burns, AND W. Kepner. Assessing the Impact of Wildland Fire on Runoff and Erosion using the Automated Geospatial Watershed Assessment Tool. 2018 ICRW, Shepherdstown, WV, July 23 - 26, 2018.
Impact/Purpose:
Presentation of the AGWA module which supports the design and placement of a suite of GI practices, to assess the impacts of wildland fire on runoff and erosion.
Description:
Functionality have been incorporated into the Automated Geospatial Watershed Assessment Tool (AGWA) to assess the impacts of wildland fire on runoff and erosion. AGWA (see: https://www.epa.gov/water-research/automated-geospatial-watershed-assessment-agwa-tool-hydrologic-modeling-and-watershed or www.tucson.ars.ag.gov/agwa) is a GIS interface jointly developed by the USDA-Agricultural Research Service, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the University of Arizona, and the University of Wyoming to automate the parameterization and execution of a suite of hydrologic and erosion models (RHEM, WEPP, KINEROS2 and SWAT). Through an intuitive interface the user selects an outlet from which AGWA delineates and discretizes the watershed using a Digital Elevation Model (DEM). The watershed model elements are then intersected with terrain, soils, and land cover data layers to derive the requisite model input parameters. Based on a small sample of pre- and post-fire rainfall-runoff data a method was developed to adjust model parameters as a function of the pre-fire vegetation cover and fire severity maps. To date AGWA was been used on over 50 wildland fires by the Department of Interior Interagency Burn Area Emergency Response teams to assess the fire impacts on runoff and erosion and support the development of Burned Area Assessment Reports. AGWA has also be used to assess the runoff and erosion impacts of wildland fire before and after forest health treatments. The presentation will review AGWA and its application for post fire assessment in several cases studies.
URLs/Downloads:
http://www.cvent.com/events/6th-interagency-conference-on-research-in-the-watersheds/archived-3567aed4bb4040af82