**Soil Erosion**

Chapter eight, by Igwe, focuses on the main effects of land management and land use changes on soil erosion in a study area in Nigeria, suggesting some possible protection

The book ends with Haghizadeh's chapter which treats the topic of daily flow model introducing the complete process from data collection to calibration and from data analysis to results comments. The study is focused on river basin in Iran and its purposes extend,

> **Danilo Godone, PhD Silvia Stanchi, PhD**

> Grugliasco (TO), Italy

NATRISK - Research Centre on Natural Risks in

Mountain and Hilly Environments

Turin University

strategies.

VIII Preface

beyond soil erosion, to flood prevention.

**Chapter 1**

**Prediction of Surface Runoff and Soil Erosion at**

**Different Environmental Conditions**

Demetrio Antonio Zema, Giuseppe Bombino,

Additional information is available at the end of the chapter

Pietro Denisi, Feliciana Licciardello and

Santo Marcello Zimbone

http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/50427

point sources (Shrestha et al., 2006).

tial step before a model can be reliably applied.

**1. Introduction**

**Watershed Scale: Analysis of the AnnAGNPS Model in**

Negative effects of surface runoff and soil erosion in watersheds can be controlled and miti‐ gated through hydrological models. Moreover, they are suitable to simulate various combi‐ nations of different scenarios of land and water management in a watershed and therefore they are useful for comparative analysis of different options and as a guide to what Best Management Practices (BMPs) can be adopted to minimize pollution from point and non‐

Continuous simulation models (e.g. AnnAGNPS, WEPP, SWAT, etc.) provide great advan‐ tages over event-based models as they allow watersheds and their response to be studied over a longer time period in an integrated way. Nowadays, several continuous watershedscale erosion models are available: however, relatively little validation of their performance under varying climatic and land use conditions has been carried out. The latter is an essen‐

The AnnAGNPS (Annualized Agricultural Non-Point Source) model (Geter and Theurer, 1998; Bingner and Theurer, 2001) is among the distributed models developed to evaluate the continuous hydrologic and water quality responses of watersheds. Many major hydrologic concepts of the single-event AGNPS model (Young et al., 1987) have been updated through the continuous simulation modeling of watershed physical processes (Baginska et al., 2003).

> © 2012 Zema et al.; licensee InTech. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use,

© 2012 Zema et al.; licensee InTech. This is a paper distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
