Soil erosion by wind is a serious problem in many parts of Europe and leads to degradation of the resource soil. In order to achieve sustainable land use, tools to identify problem areas and to evaluate environmental sound management practices are needed and necessary. Until now no wind erosion measurements have been carried out in Austria. For the fist time assessment of soil erosion by wind h...

Fluvial processes and channel development on landscapes have recently received more attention as designers attempt to establish or replace natural streams on disturbed or degraded sites. Several approaches using similar parameters have been developed to evaluate stream development and erosion processes on natural soils and landscapes. Such approaches include the Manning’s and stream power equat...

This paper presents a study on the effect of topographic variability on grid-based empirical estimation of soil erosion and sediment transport with raster geographic information systems (GIS). An original digital elevation model (DEM) of 10 m resolution for a case watershed is resampled to six realizations of greater grid sizes for a comparative examination. The Universal Soil Loss Equation (US...

The assessment of sustainability in cropping system is an important issue for natural resources management and environmental protection. Incorporating the geographical information system (GIS) and remote sensing (RS) technologies, an initial idea of the crop sustainability assessing system was thus proposed, based on ecosystem services value (ESV) assessing criterions. The system is basically c...

Purpose Excess phosphorus from fertilizer application and mobilised soil phosphorus from erosion are partially lost to the aquatic environment where they might cause eutrophication. Phosphorus emissions vary spatially and it is the goal of this study to broaden the scope of the existing inventory to the global scale and to increase the spatial resolution by accounting for relevant environmental...

GLEAMS (Leonard et al., 1987; Knisel et al., 1992; Knisel, 1993) is a continuous, field-scale hydrology and chemical transport model like Opus, simulating the transport and transformations of nutrients and pesticides in the root zone and in surface runoff. It runs on a daily time step, using daily rainfall information. GLEAMS uses a modification of the SCS Curve Number method (William and La Se...

A model was developed for estimating average annual soil loss by water on hillslope for cropland, which is called Chines Soil Loss Equation (CSLE). Six factors causing soil loss were evaluated based on soil loss data collected from experiment stations covering most regions of China and modified to the scale of Chinese unit plot defined. The model uses an empirical multiplicative equation, A=RKL...

With the increase of data resolution and the increasing application of USLE over large areas, the existing serial implementation of algorithms for computing the LS factor is becoming a bottleneck. In this paper, a parallel processing model based on message passing interface (MPI) is presented for the calculation of the LS factor, so that massive datasets at a regional scale can be processed eff...

This work describes a genetic programming (GP) approach that creates vegetation indices (VI’s) to automatically detect the sum of healthy, dry, and dead vegetation. Nowadays, it is acknowledged that VI’s are the most popular method for extracting vegetation information from satellite imagery. In particular, erosion models like the “Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation” (RUSLE) can use VI’s as i...

Soil erosion – the detachment and transportation of particles from soil aggregates by erosive agents (Stocking, 1984) – is regarded as one of South Africa’s most significant environmental problems (Meadows, 2003). In South Africa, roughly 6 million households derive all or some of their income from agriculture (South African Department of Agriculture, 2007). Roughly 25 % of the population is di...