WATERSHED MODELING IN NIGERIA USING ArcSWAT: BUILDING SUSTAINABILITY THROUGH COMMUNITY INVOLVEMENT

ArcSWAT (Soil and Water Assessment Tool) is increasingly being used in countries around the world to model and manage water and soil resources within watersheds. A community based project is underway in Osun and Ondo States, Nigeria where secondary school teachers are collaborating with faculty and graduate students at the Federal University of Technology at Akure and Bowen University in Nigeria and Brooklyn College in USA. Initial inputs for the SWAT model were ASTER, Landsat, STRM, Soil, and WMO data. To increase the spatial and temporal resolution of the data, two automated data loggers have been installed at Ataoja Secondary Science School and Bowen University in June 2009.

In May 2010, land cover validation data were collected to assess the accuracy of the land cover map created from Landsat data and soil samples were analyzed to improve the soil modeling in SWAT. After refining this pilot project in southwestern Nigeria, the community based approach will be applied to other Nigerian states to the north to allow an extensive study of water resources along a climatic gradient of wet climates in the south to arid regions in the north, and to project how climate change will affect these resources at the sub-watershed scale. By incorporating secondary school teachers in the process, Nigerian children are included in the research process, thereby increasing the science capacity of students while promoting sustainable use of water resources in their communities.