A short history of WaTEM/SEDEM

The developments of WaTEM/SEDEM was initialised at the turn of the 20th century by members of the former Laboratory for Experimental Geomorphology at KU Leuven, now the Geography and Tourism Research Group (Geography and Tourism Research Group), in 2000. A key component in the computation of sediment transport to the river was the coupling of the two models:

  1. WaTEM (Van Oost et al. 2000): a spatially distributed model that computes erosion by rainfall and tillage.

  2. SEDEM (Van Rompaey et al., 2001): a model simulating sediment-transport to the river.

Since the original publications, the model has undergone numerous iterative developments within published scientific literature. These led to numerous additional options being available within the model which can typically selected as user-choice as options.

The CN-WS extension of WaTEM/SEDEM whereby the Curve Number model is incorporated in WaTEM/SEDEM was developed between 2013 and 2016 by KU Leuven in partnership with Antea Belgium, and was commissioned by the Flemish government (Antea, 2016). The aim was to develop a tool that can quantify erosion, sediment transport and water run-off, as well as, the effect of erosion mitigation measures on these processes. CN-WS was developed on top of the original code of WaTEM/SEDEM.

Since 2016, the Government of Flanders, Department of Environment and Spatial Development (Division VPO), and the Flanders Environment Agency (VMM) commissioned further developments of CN-WS to make the model operational for management and policy purposes. A number of optimisations to the code were implemented to increase the model performance and allow a roll-out on the scale of Flanders. In addition, the model was calibrated for the context of Flanders (Deproost et al., 2018) and a framework was developed for processing CN-WS input, outputs and user choices. At this point, CN-WS has been submitted to versioning via git (https://github.com/watem-sedem/watem-sedem). These optimization tasks were executed by Fluves.

Current roles are:

  • Fluves: code developer and package maintenance.

  • KU Leuven: intellectual property holders, model creator, code developer, advisor.

  • VPO and VMM: supervisor.