Estudo da sedimentação fluvial em decorrência dos processos erosivos em municípios da região do Maciço do Baturité - Ceará

Abstract

Erosion and sedimentation are interconnected processes that play a crucial role in shaping the landscape through the production and reception of solid particles disaggregated from rocks and soil. In the semi-arid region, the study of sedimentation is important for the environmental quality of rivers, as they are the final path of sediment deposition, which denotes their importance through hydrogeographic management and in the control of hydrological problems caused, mainly, by silting. Considering this, the objective of this scientific research is to analyze, estimate and discuss the silting of river courses located throughout four municipalities in the Baturité Massif region: Baturité, Guaramiranga, Mulungu and Pacoti. The methodology used uses the sediment input ratio method to understand the flow of sediments directed to river courses based on local erosivity based on the universal soil loss equation using geoprocessing and geostatistics tools, continued of a technical field visit after the mapping. With this, three panoramas/estimates were created to interpret the results obtained from the sediment input ratio: in the first, it was quantified that in the research region there were totals of 903,144.59 t/year of soil loss due to erosion, approximately 82,926 tons of these eroded sediments, on average, are captured by drainage networks at a rate slightly lower than the global average. In the second panorama, the distribution of sedimentation rates was spatialized along the river stretches, making it possible to spatially distinguish the areas that contribute most or least to sedimentation. Finally, in the third overview, the production of sediments subject to river deposition caused by the influence of urban areas was discussed, asserting that peripheral areas are the most responsible for the silting of rivers, however, there is a hypothesis that the applied modeling does not give results. accurate when mapping very small urban areas like Guaramiranga. Finally, it is stated that despite the results achieved, other issues remain incomplete, such as a more accurate validation of the research and the inclusion of other adverse factors that affect silting, such as extreme precipitation.