An improved approach for modeling spatial distribution of water use profit—A case study in Tuhai Majia Basin, China

Water use profit (WUP) has been recognized as an important indicator of water resources management. This paper presents a set of models for evaluating the spatial distribution of economic and ecological WUP. The outputs of the models are detailed with a higher resolution than those in traditional WUP evaluation. Evapotranspiration (ET), which can be retrieved from remote sensing images, is regarded as the water consumption at the basin scale. The gridded GDP and ecosystem service value (ESV) are derived as indices of economic and ecological profits respectively. This method is applied in the Tuhai Majia Basin, North China. Agriculture is both economically and ecologically fundamental in the study area. The economic WUP of the whole basin (4.87 Yuan/m3) is slightly higher than the value of primary industry (3.39 Yuan/m3) and lower than the value of the secondary industry and tertiary industry (9.84 Yuan/m3). The ecological WUP of the whole basin (87.29 Yuan/m3) is quite close to the value of farm land. Water and wet land conservation and the development of barren land are important for ecological WUP improvement. Moreover, the dataset of WUP generated based on our method in this paper can be used for multi-scale analysis and be helpful to basin water resource management.