TAVEIRA, I. M. L. M.; http://lattes.cnpq.br/7927597906722688; TAVEIRA, Itamara Mary Leite de Menezes.
Abstract:
The Brazilian semiarid area is one of the largest and most populous regions in the
world, marked by scarcity, spatial and temporal variability of rainfall. Together with
these climate characteristics, human settlement has triggered, through the deforestation
of native vegetation and unsuitable soil handling, a process of degradation that
compromises the environmental balance of the basins in these regions. The destruction
of the caatinga, predominant vegetation in the Brazilian semiarid area, has lead to the
acceleration of soil erosion, whose features reflect social, environmental and
economical damage. The erosion can be minimized with the integrated use of
conservation practices of land use that take into account its entire main physical
attributes, ecological and economical representation. In this work, the need for
adequately planning the use of the soil resources in the Brazil's semiarid, has impelled
the adoption of the Soil and Water Assessment Tool - SWAT in the Representative
Basin of Sume (RBS), located in the superior part of the Paraiba River basin- PB, as a
tool for simulation of the runoff-erosion process for conservational planning of the use
of soil in this basin. The model performance in the processes of parameterization and
verification of consistency was analyzed through the coefficient of determination (R2)
and Nash-Sutcliffe's coefficient of efficiency (NCE). The sceneries' simulation allowed
us to evaluate how much the alterations of soil use and settlement interfere in the
processes of superficial runoff and sediment yield, and proposed a simulation in the
alternative scenery of the basin use featured as a conservational practice of vegetative
desirability: reforestation. The obtained results show that the scenery which represents
the whole preserved basin is the ideal condition in hydrological aspects, however, as the
basin has areas with strong man's interventions, the proposal for reforestation is a
plausible alternative in the conservational planning of the Representative Basin of
Sume. Finally, the results obtained in this paper can be the basis for the analysis of
alternative handling, aiming at the reduction of the impacts of man's activities in the
watershed and supporting the planning of the use and management of basins in
conservational bases.
