Eco-Hydrological Modelling of a Highly Managed Mediterranean Basin Using the SWAT+ Model: A Preliminary Approach

Highly managed Mediterranean river basins are facing considerable environmental management challenges. Water resource managers are increasingly concerned about the allocation of limited water resources, environmental quality concerns, and planning under present and future climatic change and uncertainty. We implemented a watershed-scale eco-hydrological model on the Cervaro river basin (southern Italy) using the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT+) model at daily timesteps from 1990 to 2019. A high-precision land use map derived from the Integrated Administration and Control System (IACS)/Land Parcel Identification System (LPIS) was used to grasp detailed information regarding landscape patterns. This research is a preliminary approach for implementing and running the model with these highly detailed datasets. Future efforts should be oriented to fine-tune the baseline scenario considering agricultural management practices and to evaluate model performances for calibration and validation by assessing the goodness-of-fit objective function values.