Performance Evaluation of SWAT Model for Land Use and Land Cover Changes in Semi-Arid Climatic Conditions: A Review

Abstract

Evaluation of land use land cover changes on the hydrological regime of river basins is one of the concerns in the global climate change. With plethora of tools available in the literature choosing of an appropriate tool that can quantify and analyze the impact of land use land cover changes on the hydrological regime in a systematic and planned manner is important. Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) integrated with Geographic Information System (GIS) based interfaces and its easy linkage to sensitivity, calibration and uncertainty analysis tools made its applicability more simple and has great potential in simulation of the past, present and future scenarios. A number of standards were used to appraise the model set-up, model performances, physical representation of the model parameters, and the accuracy of the hydrological model balance to assess the models that are defined in journal papers. On the basis of performance indicators, the mainstream of the SWAT models were categorized as providing satisfactory to very good. This review debates on the application of SWAT in analyzing land use land cover changes in semi-arid environment. Application of SWAT and land use land cover simulation models for impact assessment in semi-arid region improves accuracy, reduces costs, and allows the simulation of a wide variety of conservation practices at watershed scale. It is also observed that different researchers and/or model versions bring about in different outcomes while a comparison of SWAT model applications on similar case study was applied. This review determines the interactive role of SWAT and GIS technologies in improving integrated watershed management in semi-arid environments.