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Abstract
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The use of the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) has expanded rapidly worldwide during the past two decades. This is evidenced by nearly 3,000 peer-reviewed SWAT-related articles that have been published in hundreds of reputable journals and likely thousands of other studies which have been published in conference proceedings and other formats. The influence of SWAT within water resources research and related disciplines is further confirmed by a variety of recent bibliometric analyses, which reveal the impact that the model has had across a broad spectrum of the scientific community. The impact of SWAT globally can also be seen in the ever increasing types of applications that the model is being applied for including dozens of studies that report some type of code modification, most of which have not been ported to the main SWAT code at present. Broad indicators of SWAT use are reviewed here including relative use among different countries, regions and continents as well as dominant trends in the peer-reviewed literature including assessment of leading journals and disciplines that are the forefront of publishing current SWAT literature. Key trends in SWAT use are also reviewed including emerging application subcategories such as combined land use change and climate change impact studies, evaluations of bioenergy cropping systems, assessment of crop water productivity or blue/green water analyses, interfaces of SWAT BMP assessments with evolutionary algorithms, impacts of urban BMPs on storm water runoff and pollutant loss and determination of optimal parameter inputs at multi-regional/country levels. Further review is provided regarding applications describing unique modifications to the SWAT code for enhanced simulation of specific environmental conditions including modifications to groundwater or soil layer components, introduction of revised snowmelt algorithms, improved ability to represent rice paddies, advanced nutrient cycling capabilities and revised i
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