Assessment of soil erosion based on usle model and application of GIS

Abstract

Soil erosion is one of the major ecological troubles which threaten our natural reserves. In developing countries the soil erosion evaluation is tough task mainly because the important data are insufficient or sometime are not accessible. USLE is the most widely used empirical formulae for evaluating gross erosion from any basin. Merging the same with recent technology of remote sensing could provide us with more precise results. The model separates the soil erosion process into a water phase and a sediment part. It considers soil erosion to result from the detachment of soil particles by raindrop impact and the transport of those particles by overland flow. The model tries to cover some of the recent advances in perceptive of erosion processes. In this paper the application of USLE model and GIS, for soil loss estimation has been attempted for Ravi Shankar Sagar Reservoir catchment area, Dhamtari district, Chhattisgarh in Mahanadi river basin. This study was envisaged to map the distribution of soil erosion in the watershed and to compute the average annual soil loss (tones/hectare/year) by combining the USLE method, GIS and Remote Sensing Technique. The results show that the average value of erosion was 22.7 t/ha/yr. The area under very severe soil erosion was 14246 ha.