Article Assessing Climate Change Impacts on Streamflow, Sediment and Nutrient Loadings of the Minija River (Lithuania): A Hillslope Watershed Discretization Application with High-Resolution Spatial Inputs Natalja Čerkasova 1,*, Georg Umgiesser 1,2 and Ali Ertürk 3 1 Marine Research Institute, Klaipeda University, 92294 Klaipeda, Lithuania;
[email protected] 2 ISMAR-CNR, Institute of Marine Sciences, 30122 Venezia, Italy 3 Department of Inland Water Resources and Management, Faculty of Aquatic Sciences, Istanbul University, 34134 Istanbul, Turkey;
[email protected] * Correspondence:
[email protected]; Tel.: +370-6-8301-627 Received: 5 February 2019; Accepted: 28 March 2019; Published: 1 April 2019 Abstract: In this paper we focus on the model setup scheme for medium-size watershed with high resolution, multi-site calibration, and present results on the possible changes of the Minija River in flow, sediment load, total nitrogen (TN), and total phosphorus (TP) load in the near-term (up to 2050) and long-term (up to 2099) in the light of climate change (RCP 4.5 and RCP 8.5 scenarios) under business-as-usual conditions. The SWAT model for the Minija River basin was setup by using the developed Matlab (SWAT-LAB) scripts for a highly customized watershed configuration that addresses the specific needs of the project objective. We performed the watershed delineation by combining sub-basin and hillslope discretization schemes. We defined the HRUs by aggregating the topographic, land use, soil, and administrative unit features of the area. A multisite manual calibration approach was adopted to calibrate and validate the model, achieving good to satisfactory results across different sub-basins of the area for flow, sediments and nutrient loads (TP and TN).