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There is a high demand for Geographic Information System (GIS) tools or interfaces to estimate the impact of Best Management Practices (BMPs) for large watersheds. The Water Erosion Prediction Project (WEPP) DOS executable had been validated for several plots and watershed sites in the US. The latest WEPP Windows version using the very same DOS executable - offers a user-friendly interface to implement the latest site-specific BMP in detail. After validating the WEPP Windows interface for the original validation sites for the first time, we systematically implemented two BMPs - field border and grassed waterway - to observe the potential impact on soil loss, runoff and sediment yields at these validation sites.

The new Geospatial interface for the WEPP model (GeoWEPP) allows preparing the WEPP model input from large GIS data sets. However, one has to realize that the WEPP channel routing algorithms were originally not designed to simulate channel processes in watersheds more than 260 ha. Instead, the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) offers a channel routing procedure that allows simulation of larger channel networks. Therefore, we discuss the following steps required to systematically link the GeoWEPP hillslope model simulations with the SWAT channel routing and prepare data sets to test the validity of a GeoWEPP-SWAT-link to the observed measurements and simulated results of the WEPP validation sites.