Study site description: Guadalentín Basin, Spain

Table of Contents

1. Responsible partner
2. General Information
3. Biophysical description
   1. Climate, geology and geomorphology
   2. Soil, vegetation and land use
   3. Land use change
   4. Groundwater, water transfers, and irrigation
4. Socio-economic description
   1. Demography and education
   2. Livelihood, migration, land conversion and land degradation
5. Institutional and political setting
6. Relevant stakeholders
7. Past and ongoing projects in the Guadalentín
   1. Previous assessments of erosion rates and land degradation
   2. Conceptual frameworks and model applications
8. References

Conceptual frameworks and model applications

In order to understand spatial and temporal variability of erosion and hydrologic behaviour, several studies have tried to describe the interactions between plants, soil, topography, lithology and climate in an effort to identify uniform areas with respect to hydrological and geomorphic processes behaviour. An example is the concept of the Desertification Response Unit (DRU) (Imeson et al., 1995; Imeson et al., 1996; Imeson et al., 1998) that was developed with the intention to identify spatial patterns and to link hydrological processes from one spatial and temporal scale to another.

Increasingly, the use of indicators has been promoted to monitor the changes in the status of land degradation over time and make spatial comparisons. Many indicators have been proposed for this purpose and the EU-funded project DESERTLINKS was an effort to select the most useful indicators for each study site amongst which the Guadalentín basin. The DIS4ME database, developed during the DESERTLINKS project (http://www.kcl.ac.uk/projects/desertlinks/) contains about 150 desertification indicators. Each indicator is clearly defined and the user can select indicators according to various logical frameworks, temporal and spatial scales. Furthermore, an Environmental Sensitivity Index can be calculated based on a selection of 13 indicators associated with vegetation, soil, climate and management.

Other studies have tried to obtain better knowledge about processes through development of simulation models, with the ultimate goal the prediction of impacts of land use and climate changes on hydrology, soil erosion, river morphology and floods. For example, Brookes et al (2000), later continued by Hooke et al (2005), worked on the development of a simulation model called CHANGISM, capable of describing the morphological changes of ephemeral streams after flood events under the impact of climate change and human impacts (Brookes et al., 2000; Hooke et al., 2005). First tests of the model suggest that the major controls of changes in morphology are those factors affecting flow velocity (i.e. event size and slope) and sediment load (Hooke et al., 2005).