Modeling of the Drainage Areas of the Donskaya Tsaritsa River
The article presents the results of modeling the catchment area of the Donskaya Tsaritsa River, which are necessary for the creation of adaptive agroforestry complexes that resist land degradation and desertification. Mapping and modeling of catchment areas of small rivers, one of which is the Donskaya Tsaritsa River, are actual and accessible tools for studying the features of the surface runoff formation, its nature, direction and area. The relevance of the research work is due to the fact that the catchment area modeling with actual tools has not been studied enough, and the available methods are based on classical methods of study, which often do not differ in sufficient accuracy. The studied object is located in two districts of the Volgograd region (Svetloyarsky and Kalachovsky) and is a left tributary of the Don River flowing into the Tsimlyanskoye reservoir. With the help of geoinformation technologies, modeling makes it possible to identify a number of surface runoff indicators, as well as to measure the characteristics of the Donskaya Tsaritsa River catchment area relief. The result of the study was the catchment areas modeling on the territory of the Donskaya Tsaritsa River basin and the creation of a digital terrain model of the catchment relief map and a map of its flow direction. As a result of the performed study, a height difference was revealed, which amounted to 154 m, with the predominant northern (25.4% of cells) and western (15.8% of cells) flow direction. The analysis of cartographic data revealed 379 catchment areas within the Donskaya Tsaritsa River. The catchment area according to the simulation results was 1563.5 km2