Notice of RetractionIntegration of a Water Balance Model with a Decision Support Tool in the Loess Plateau of China

Notice of Retraction

After careful and considered review of the content of this paper by a duly constituted expert committee, this paper has been found to be in violation of IEEE´s Publication Principles.

We hereby retract the content of this paper. Reasonable effort should be made to remove all past references to this paper.

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In order to reduce the massive soil erosion and to ensure sustainable development, the Chinese central government planned revegetation measures to reduce these environmental problems-especially in the Loess Plateau. This revegetation process will not only result in less soil erosion in the coarse sandy hilly catchments (CSHC), but also less runoff due to increased evapotranspiration (ET). A water balance model of Zhang et al. (2001) was used to estimate the subsequent impact on stream flow and its spatial distribution in this region at first, but the results showed that the model was not able to accurately simulate average annual stream flow when compared with stream flow measurements from 38 hydrologic stations in CSHC of the Loess Plateau. Zhang et al. (2008) calibrated the model, and it can accurately simulate the impacts of the region on streamflow. The recommended areas for revegetation and the suitability for each of 38 perennial species are also researched in the region. To provide a direct simulate result for policy makers and soil and water managers with the information that they need to make better decisions, a decision support tools called Revegetation Impacts on Hydrology (ReVegIH) was developed in Microsoft. NET environment using C# and the invisible modeling environment (TIME). ReVegIH provides besides basic geographical information system (GIS) functions, impacts of different revegetation result on runoff and ET, revegetation and priority areas for trees and shrubs, the suitability of 38 species fo- planting in the CSHC. The establishment of ReVegIH provided a very efficient way of managing revegetation species and areas, showing simulate result of the model, calibrating model coefficient. ReVegIH does not consider loading other catchments or counties dataset to simulate and also loading map is not efficient enough.