In recent years, watershed desolation is going on in many river basins of many countries. The causes of it are different in each country. In some countries under developing, heavy shift cultivation, irrational reclamabonof farmland, and unscrupulous cuts of firewood etc. are causing this kind of desolation. Whi1e in other countries, abandonment of forest management caused by the depopulation of rural communities is the major cause of desolation.
These kinds of desolation are producing problems of new kinds. Unexpectedly heavy floods are suffering people after the rainfalls of ordinary magnitude in some watersheds. The water sources are suddenly exhausting in some other watersheds.
To fight against these difficulties. periodical monitoring of the environmental conservation capability of each watershed seems to be necessary. For example, the capability of flood prevention should be eva1uated once in every 5 years or so to watch out and forecast the deterioradon of the capability.
And some countermeasures should be prepared if necessary to prevent fiood disasters in future.
The authors are going to propose the ways necessary to evaluate these kinds of capabi1ity of watershed like flood prevention, water source fostering, soil erosion prevention etc. Several reports are now being prepared for this purpose.
In this report. the authors proposed one practical method to evaluate the f1ood prevention capability of watershed. ‘Forest-Plan Map’and‘Forest Data-book’were utilized as the materials for evaluation. And in this evaluadon, the roughness coefficient N for kinematic wave model was estimated to represent the capability of flood prevention. An example of evaluation in a watershed of Tsubo-river basin of Gifu-Prefecture was also shown in this report.
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