Evaluation of Land-Use Changes Impact on Watershed Health Using Probabilistic Approaches

This study evaluated watershed health (WH) change using reference values for environmental changes at various times. Land use in 1985 was defined as the reference value under the most natural conditions, and the WH for the years 1995 to 2019 was calculated in comparison to 1985. The proposed method was used to assess the WH of 78 standard subbasins in South Korea’s Geum River Basin (GRB), where complex land-use change has occurred since 1995. For evaluating hydrology and water quality (WQ) health index, Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) and four land-use maps (1985, 1995, 2008, and 2019) were used to simulate the hydrology and WQ. A multivariate normal distribution (MND) from poor (0) to good (1) was used to assess WH based on SWAT modeling results. Based on the reference value, the WQ health from 1995 to 2019 changed to within 0.1, while the range of changes in the hydrology index was analyzed over 0.18. As a result of WH changes from 1985 to 2019, hydrological health deteriorated in high-density urbanized subbasins, while WQ health deteriorated in upland-cultivation-increased subbasins. This study provides useful information for recognizing potential WH issues related to long-term environmental changes.