Development of GIS Interface Tool for GAMES Model and Its Application to an Agricultural Watershed in Southern Ontario

Soil erosion is an important economic and environmental concern throughout the world. In order to assess soil erosion risk and conserve soil and water resources, soil erosion modeling at the watershed scale is imperative. The Guelph model for evaluating effects of Agricultural Management System on Erosion and Sedimentation (GAMES) is tailor-made for such applications; it, however, requires a significant amount of spatial information which needs to be pre-processed using a Geographic Information System (GIS). The GAMES model currently lacks any such automated tools. As such, the GAMES was loosely coupled to a GIS interface to manage the large spatial input data and to produce efficient cartographic representations of model output results. The developed interface tool was tested to simulate the Kettle Creek paired watershed in Southern Ontario, Canada. Result demonstrated that the GIS-assisted procedure increased the ability of the GAMES model in simulating such a spatially varied watershed and made the process more efficient and user-friendly. Furthermore, the quality of reporting and displaying resultant spatial output was also significantly improved. The developed GAMES interface could be applied to any watershed, and the enhancement could be used to assess soil erosion risk and conserve soil and water resources in an effective way.