| Title |
Assessing the human impact on hydrology activities in the Gaborone Dam catchment, Botswana |
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| Author |
Fleischer, M., Kenabatho, P., Kralisch, S., Fink, M., Helmschrot, J., Butchart-Kuhlmann, D., Meinhardt, M. & Parida, B. P. |
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| Abstract |
One of the major challenges of hydrological modelling in semiarid areas of Southern Africa is
the balance between data availability and adequate assessment of impacts of land use/ land
cover and human activities on hydrological conditions at small to medium catchment scales.
The Gaborone Dam catchment in Botswana is an example, in which human activities have
influenced flow dynamics leading to reduced dam inflows due to the construction of more
than 200 small farm dams spread across the catchment. However, due to insufficient rainfall
recording instruments or adequate flow gauging stations in the catchment, the effects of
human activities and rainfall variability on runoff generation processes in the catchment and
its associated impact on the dam inflow were not quantitatively assessed. In this study, some
neighbouring flow stations with sufficient runoff data, available land cover information, and
data about small dams have been used to study relevant hydrological processes. Information
from these catchments were then transferred to the Gaborone Dam catchment to feed a
distributed, process-oriented hydrological modelling system (JAMS/J2000) in order to
describe and assess the hydrologic conditions under different scenarios. Initially, the model
was built and validated to accurately represent the undisturbed hydrological conditions in the
basin (baseline model). The validated baseline model was applied to study different
anthropogenic interventions such as withholding predetermined water amounts in order to
address the impact of farm dams. Here we present first modelling results indicating a notable
impact of human activities on runoff and storage dynamics in the basin. |
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| Citation |
Fleischer, M., Kenabatho, P., Kralisch, S., Fink, M., Helmschrot, J., Butchart-Kuhlmann, D., Meinhardt, M. & Parida, B. P. (2016). Assessing the human impact on hydrology activities in the Gaborone Dam catchment, Botswana. Proceedings of the 17th WaterNet/WARFSA/GWPSA Symposium. Presented at the 17th WaterNet/WARFSA/GWPSA Symposium, Gaborone.
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