Land-use influence on the soil hydrology: An approach in upper Grande River basin, Southeast Brazil

ABSTRACT Brazil is a large country that depends on the hydroelectricity generation hydropower dams. The Upper Grande River Basin (UGRB) is one of the most important Brazilian hydrological regions in terms of water availability and electric energy production. Therefore, studies of water availability are indispensable for a better and more successful decision making in water resources management in the region. This study objective to approach the land-use influence on the soil hydrology in the Upper Grande River Basin, a strategic headwater basin of southeastern Brazil. This study uses hydrological indicators (baseflow/runoff (BF/R) and overland flow/runoff (OF/R)) extracted from eight watersheds, varying the size and localization in the region, to support the results found. Soil saturated hydraulic conductivity (Ko) was determined in situ using a constant flow permeameter, totaling 224 sampled points. Five machine learning algorithms were compared in their performance to predict Ko (Random Forest, Support Vector Machine, Gradient Boosting, Linear Regression, Regularization) using terrain attributes as covariates. The tested methods for predicting Ko resulted in a relatively low coefficient of determination (R2) due to the high spatial variability of this soil hydrologic attribute. The hydrological indicator BF/R was sensitive to land-use changes in the watersheds. The greatest Ko values were associated with native forest and the least values area associated with pasture and rupestrian field.