Coupling of hydrological and ecological process: An approach to implement the sustainable water resources management in Hanjiang watershed

Research in the combination of hydrological variation and ecological demands plays an important role in water availability assessment and sustainable management in watershed scale. An integrative frame, consisting of hydrological regime modeling, ecological water demands estimation and recoverable resources management, is presented in this paper in order to support the implementation of the sustainable water resources management. The proposed integrative frame has been used to the research of the integrated water resources management in southern Hanjiang watershed, the water source of South-to-North Water Transportation Project in China. The amounts of ecological water demands under current situation and climate changes, is also estimated in order to evaluate the available water resources for the local users and the transportation project. Thereby, a scheme by coupling multi-water resources, namely the available water resources, the recovering rate of water resources in natural water cycle, the local water use rate and the amounts of the water transported to North, was proposed, in which the Scheafer model is applied to analyze their evolution. Eventually, the sustainable water resources management measures were assembled by the comprehensive evaluation of the schemes. The results indicate the proposed methodology provides a new way for the integrative water resources management in watershed.