Modeling land use change impacts on a tropical river basin in Brazil

Water scarcity has affected the Atlantic Forest and other biomes in Brazil. To address this situation, the Brazilian Forest Code was created to control deforestation and promote sustainable development. However, how effective is this code for water production? After the cacao crises in 1980s, the Cachoeira River Basin has suffered from changes in water disponibility. Within this framework, the objective of this paper was to evaluate the Soil and Water Assessment Tool for modeling the flow behavior of the Cachoeira River Basin between 1985 and 2005 using manual calibration process under two alternative scenarios in order to obtain information that supports the guidelines regarding the future water resources management plans in the basin. Split sample test and differential split sample test were applied for calibration/validation process, and flow duration curve performance was used as a complementary procedure to attest the model. The scenario assessment results revealed that both scenarios proposed by the study did not affect significantly the hydrological services in the basin, suggesting that the land use changes that happened after the cacao crisis in the late 1980s did not affect substantially the water services in the Cachoeira River Basin.