Study on the Topographic Effect on Soil Erosion Using RUSLE Model for Small Size Watershed

Soil erosion and subsequent sedimentation have caused serious environmental and soil degradation problems in Okinawa Prefecture,Japan.This research aims at evaluating an availability of the Revised Universal Soil loss Equation（RUSLE） for predicting the range of soil loss values for the Nago watershed in Okinawa.It shows that climatic conditions substantially influence the rainfall amount as a function of the I30 of the rainfall event.The rate of soil loss is higher with increasing in altitude due to greater slope steepness.By rainfall data analysis,it is concluded that the large difference in soil loss between 2000 and 2001 was due to concentrated heavy rainfall in the rainy season or the typhoon season.

An updated isoerodent map of the conterminous United States

Maps of erosivity,which are also commonly referred to as isoerodent maps,have played a critical role in soil conservation efforts in the United States and around the world.Currently available erosivity maps for the United States are either outdated,conflict with erosivity benchmarking studies,or utilized less advanced spatial mapping methods.Furthermore,it is possible that the same underlying issues with US maps are impacting global maps as well.In this study,we used more than 340015-min,fixed-interval precipitation gauges to update the isoerodent map of the conterminous United States.Erosivity values were interpolated using universal kriging under several spatial model configurations and resolutions.The optimal spatial model was selected based on which result had the lowest sample variogram error.Rainfall,erosivity,and erosivity density maps were compared to existing products.Some average annual and annual erosivity results were compared to high-quality erosivity benchmarking publications.Erosivity values from both RUSLE2 and Panagos et al.(2017)were generally lower in the eastern United States and mixed in the western United States compared to our results.Topographic effects resulted in much greater erosivity differences in this study as compared to prior maps.Benchmark comparisons revealed that erosivity maps from this study and others were lower than the benchmark by 14%or more(up to 38%).These findings suggest current practices of storm omission and intensity dampening correction need to be revisited,especially in locations with relatively low-to-moderate rainfall erosivity such as the Midwest or Northeast United States,for example.

Soil loss tolerance in the black soil region of Northeast China

Soil loss tolerance （/） is the maximum rate of annual soil erosion that is tolerated and still allows a high level of crop productivity to be sustained economically and indefinitely. In the black soil region of Northeast China, an empirically determined, default Tvalue of 200 （t/km2.a） is used for designing land restoration strategies for different types of soils. The ob- jective of this study was to provide a methodology to calculate a quantitative T for different black soil species. A field investigation was conducted to determine the typical soil profiles of 21 black soil species in the study area and a quantitative methodology based on a modified soil productivity index model was established to calculate the Tvalues. These values, which varied from 68 t/km2.a to 358 t/km2-a, yielded an average Tvalue of 141 t/km2.a for the 21 soil species. This is 29.5% lower than the current national standard T value. Two significant factors that influenced the T value were soil thickness and vulnerability to erosion. An acceptable reduction rate of soil productivity over a planned time period of 1% is recommended as necessary for maintaining long-term sustainable soil productivity. Compared with the cur- rently used of regional unified standard T value, the proposed method, which determines T using specific soil profile indices, has more practical implications for effective, sustainable management of soil and water conservation.