suspended sediment: a suitable estimator for soil organic matter loss

abstract suspended sediment resulted from distributed soil erosions facilitates soil nutrients transportation and influences soil depletion. soil erosion plays a key role in loss of organic matter and therefore study of the relationship between organic matter and soil erosion processes and soil nutrient loss is very important. the present case study was conducted in kojour educational forest watershed with an area of 13263 ha to determine the relationship between eroded suspended sediment and organic matter through daily sediment sampling and measurement of suspended sediment. the water and suspended sediment sampling was made via depth-integration. the determination of suspended sediment and organic matter contents was made by decantation and loss on ignition methods, respectively. then the relationship between variables was assessed by bivariate regression method and descriptive statistics. the results of this study showed that there were high variations of organic matter and suspended sediment with respective coefficient of variation of 150 and 107. similar trend in variation for both variables in different time periods was also proved by developing regression models with correlation coefficients from 0.48 (p<0.01) to 0.94 (p<0.001) and estimation and verification errors less than 28.05 and 26.60%, respectively.