Studying the role of old agricultural terraces on runoff generation in a small Mediterranean mountainous basin

The small drainage basin of Cal Parisa was instrumented in early 1989 to study the hydrological and sediment routing behaviour of Mediterranean mountain areas formerly used for agriculture but now abandoned. Environmental changes produced by agricultural land use included the construction of terraces on the major part of the basin and subsequent artificial channelling of surface waters. Field observations and hydrological data suggest that storm runoff is generated by the contributing role of saturated areas, most of them originating from the terrace system. Modelling of the natural conditions before terracing, with the help of TOPMODEL, supports the hypothesis that terracing promotes the premature formation of saturated areas, increasing saturation overland flow at the expense of lower baseflow and actual evapotranspiration. Now, after land abandonment, the more relevant environmental hazard is linked to the spontaneous reorganization of the unmaintained artificial drainage network.