International Conference Erosion and Torrent Control as a Factor in Sustainable River Basin Management 25-28 September 2007, Belgrade – Serbia GIS MODEL FOR ASSESSING WATER AND SEDIMENT DISCHARGE BASED ON THE METHODOLOGY OF GAVRILOVIĆ Ivan MINČEV 1 Ivan BLINKOV 2 , 1 Mediterranean Agronomic Institute of Chania, Crete, Greece, Department of Environmental Management i_mincev@yahoo.com 2 Faculty of forestry – Skopje, Institute of Forestry, Dept. of Land and Water, Bul. Alexandar Makedonski bb, 1000 Skopje, Republic of Macedonia, fax: +389 2 164560 blinkov@sf.ukim.edu.mk Abstract Erosion has been an on-going problem for centuries. It has followed all the great civilizations. Not so long time ago man realized the great risks that follow the erosion. There have been several methods developed for assessing water and sediment discharge during the years with yield of good and bad results. For this purpose in the region of Grdelička gorge it has been developed the method of Gavrilović which yielded good results for climatically and spatially similar regions. Also this method was largely accepted in the Republic of Macedonia. With the development of new technologies it is of most importance to implement them in the existing methodologies. So the main goal of this paper is to implement GIS (Geographic Information Systems) in the data extraction and analysis. There have been used several standardized datasets for development of the GIS model (CORINE land cover, Erosion map of R.Macedonia, geological map, DEM, climatic data). The main objective is to implement datasets with already established production methodologies and quality into the process of sedi- ment and water discharge GIS based assessment. Key words: GIS model, discharge, sediment transport 1. INTODUCTION In the last years there has been a huge development in the spatial representation and analysis of the data. The GIS (Geographical Information Systems) is an integral part of the new developments and it represents a big leap towards better understanding of the spatial ex- tent of the environmental problems. The general strive of the global scientific community is to overcome the established national borders and to unite in the struggle with the overcoming environmental problems which do not confine in the human perception of fragmented world. One of the first products made in larger scale is the existing CORINE land cover, developed by the European Envi- ronmental Agency (EEA). The main idea here is to produce a map developed with the same methodology and with uniform quality. So the future of the solving of the environmental problems is to perceive the problems globally and to produce spatial data which will be avail- able to the broad scientific community. The GIS represents set of tools which can make the life easier to the user. GIS modeling pre- sents an opportunity to automatise the process of production of output with standardized input and already set parameters. In recent time there have been several attempts to implement the already established scientific models into the GIS environment. There have been several de- veloped software packages which implement these algorithms into the spatio-digital environ- ment (HEC-RAS, WEPP, ARC-INFO, USLE, KINEROS…..). The main idea of this study is to use the existing national datasets which are with stan- dardized quality and to implement them in the existing developed methodologies, like the one of Gavrilović. 1 of 7