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Trading off Accuracy and Computational Efficiency of an Afforestation Site Location Method for Minimizing Sediment Yield in a River Catchment

Authors:
René Estrella
Pablo Vanegas
Dirk Cattrysse
Jos Van Orshoven

Keywords: Site location, Spatial interaction, Sediment yield, Optimization, Afforestation

Abstract:
The Cellular Automata based method for Minimizing Flow (CAMF) aims at selecting, from a rasterized database representing a river catchment, a predefined number of cells that should be afforested in order to minimize the sediment yield of the catchment. To this end, CAMF iteratively ranks cells according to sediment yield reduction, taking into account spatial interaction among cells. It was found during tests that the execution time of CAMF is directly proportional to the database size and the number of cells to be selected. This behavior can become a limiting factor for the applicability of CAMF to high resolution databases that cover large geographical areas. This issue motivated the necessity of exploring simplified CAMF variants that reduce its execution time and preserve the accuracy of its results. For this purpose, a simplified variant called on-site CAMF was devised, implemented and tested. On-site CAMF ranks cells based only on local cell information, i.e., the local sediment reduction that afforestation would produce in a cell, and the cell slope. During tests, on-site CAMF produced virtually the same results as the original version of CAMF in only a small fraction of the execution time. This means that, for these particular tests, spatial interaction did not influence CAMF output, possibly due to the number of cells that were selected, which was small with respect to the full geodatabase size. It is expected that spatial interaction becomes a relevant factor when larger sets of cells are selected.

Pages: 94 to 100

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2014

Publication date: March 23, 2014

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-393X

ISBN: 978-1-61208-326-1

Location: Barcelona, Spain

Dates: from March 23, 2014 to March 27, 2014