Application of SWAT and APEX Models Using SWAPP (SWAT/APEX Program) for the Upper North Bosque River Watershed in Texas

Abstract

Environmental models are used to assess and evaluate various best management practices (BMPs) at field (e.g., Agricultural Policy/Environmental eXtender, APEX) and watershed (e.g., Soil and Water Assessment Tool, SWAT) levels. However, models such as SWAT and APEX are only capable of simulating mechanistically a limited number of BMP scenarios individually. Therefore, this study was conducted to: 1) develop an automated program referred to as SWAPP to convert SWAT files to-and-from APEX format and simulate SWAT and APEX simultaneously; and 2) to evaluate this program using measured data from the upper North Bosque River watershed in central Texas.