Paper short abstract:

The aim of this research is to develop a decision support system that will support to find the stakeholders involved in land degradation and water resources management taking into account the climate change in order to control and limit the most vulnerable areas.

Paper long abstract:

Recent studies on vulnerability to climate change show a trend towards increased aridity accelerating water erosion which is the primary factor to be considered by decision makers in the environmental field. Furthermore, Water erosion is a complex and widespread phenomenon mainly in semi-arid countries due to the torrential nature of rainfall, their spatial variability and the heterogeneity of soils as well as the adverse impact of human activities. In order to quantify the rate of sediment, and assess the risk of erosion in the the watershed Kalaya located in north of Morocco, the SWAT model (Soil and Water Assessment Tool) have been chosen in this study. This distributed model physically based, developed by Agricultural Research Services of the USDA, is largely used in such a study, because of the reliability of its results. SWAT operates on a continuous daily time step and requires a large spatiotemporal database constitute of the Digital Elevation Model, land use, layers pedological and its characteristics and daily meteorological data. In SWAT, the basin will be discretized into sub-basins, which will be then further subdivided into hydrological response units (HRUs) with homogeneous land use, soil type and slope. The system and the model developed in the catchment will give a clear picture of the spaces where the risk of erosion is most likely in the study area. They will assess the impact of different corrective methods of this risk and they will select the most appropriate practices in each area to solve problems.