Analysis of the tradeoff between agriculture and ecosystem preservation using a new ecohydrological model

Inner-basin water use conflicts are common in arid and semi-arid areas. As the second largest endorheic river basin in China, the Heihe River Basin (HRB) is exemplary of such conflicts between agriculture and ecosystem preservation. The densely distributed agriculture in the middle HRB (M-HRB) consumes a large amount of water, which has directly threatened the fragile and water-limited ecosystem in the lower HRB (L-HRB). To alleviate the conflict and prevent the trend of ecological deterioration of the L-HRB, an Ecological Water Diversion Project (EWDP) has been implemented since 2000 to ensure that enough water is released to the L-HRB. With the water diversion, an increase in the leaf area index (LAI) has been observed in the L-HRB. However, to ensure the annually allocated streamflow discharge to the L-HRB, more groundwater (GW) has been pumped for irrigation in the M-HRB, which has led to declining GW levels. How to make water management more sustainable for both agriculture and ecosystem has thus become an urgent issue. Crops and natural vegetation play vital roles in affecting the water cycle, hence it should be well integrated into a hydrological model for water management. A new Hydrological and Ecological Integrated watershed-scale FLOW model (HEIFLOW) has been developed. HEIFLOW is based on an improved version of the GSFLOW developed by the USGS and a General Eco-Hydrological Module (GEHM) developed in this study to simulate plant growth kinetics. The model has been applied to simulate the ecohydrological conditions in the M- and L-HRB. The model results show a consistently good agreement with the observation data. Analysis using the new integrated model indicates that the M-HRB GW system is not sustainable, and that the agriculture in the M-HRB has to sacrifice itself for ecological restoration in the L-HRB under the current water allocation strategy. The restoration of lower basin was further assessed under a new allocation strategy that aims to improve the GW sustainability in the M-HRB without endangering the ecological recovery in the L-HRB. The comparison between the current and new strategies shows that the diversion project needs to be revised to fully consider the tradeoff between the agriculture and GW sustainability in the M-HRB, and the consequence of the ecological restoration effort in the L-HRB.