RUJA: Repositorio Institucional de Producción Científica

 

Nature-based solutions for flood mitigation and soil conservation in a steep-slope olive-orchard catchment (Arquillos, Spain)

Fecha

2023-02-23

Título de la revista

ISSN de la revista

Título del volumen

Editor

MDPI

Resumen

The frequency and magnitude of flash floods in the olive orchards of southern Spain have increased because of climate change and unsustainable olive-growing techniques. Affected surfaces occupy >85% of the rural regions of the Upper Guadalquivir Basin. Dangerous geomorphic processes record the increase of runoff, soil loss and streamflow through time. We report on ripple/dune growth over a plane bed on overland flows, deep incision of ephemeral gullies in olive groves and rock-bed erosion in streams, showing an extraordinary sediment transport capacity of sub-daily pluvial floods. We develop a novel method to design optimal solutions for natural flood management and erosion risk mitigation. We adopt physical-based equations and build a whole-system model that accurately reproduces the named processes. The approach yields the optimal targeted locations of nature-based solutions (NbSs) for active flow-control by choosing the physical-model parameters that minimise the peak discharge and the erosion-prone area, maximising the soil infiltration capacity. The sub-metric spatial resolution used to resolve microtopographic features of terrains/NbS yields a computational mesh with millions of cells, requiring a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) to run massive numerical simulations. Our study could contribute to developing principles and standards for agricultural-management initiatives using NbSs in Mediterranean olive and vineyard orchards.

Descripción

Palabras clave

nature-based solutions, distributed hydrological model, IBER+, Guadalquivir Basin, European Union Directive 2007/60, flash flood, gully erosion, olive and vineyard orchards

Citación

Bohorquez P., Perez-Latorre F.J., Gonzalez-Planet I., Jimenez-Melero R., Parra G. Nature-based solutions for flood mitigation and soil conservation in a steep-slope olive-orchard catchment (Arquillos, Spain). Applied Science, 13(5): 2882, 2023.

Colecciones