Developing a Software to Evaluate Hydrological Effect of Forest Change

Water conservation is one of the most important functions of forest ecosystems. An efficient assessment on changes in water conservation capacity of a forest watershed, especially for a large watershed is essential for water resources and forest management. In order to simplify the assessment procedures, we took advantage of ENVI / IDL and ArcGIS Engine / C # .NET hybrid programming languages and developed an assessment software (Forest Water Assessment Tool, FWAT) for calculating forest water conservation capacity based on the integrated water storage capacity method. In addition, we used the Meijiang watershed as an example to demonstrate the application of FWAT to calculate water conservation capacity. The spatial distribution and statistical results of forest water conservation capacity in the Meijiang watershed were successfully calculated by FWAT. It shows that FWAT is a very useful tool that can be widely used in evaluating water conservation capacity of forested watersheds and support decision-makers with a quick access to scientific information regarding forest and water management.