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AUTOMATED GIS WATERSHED ANALYSIS TOOLS FOR RUSLE/SEDMOD SOIL EROSION AND SEDIMENTATION MODELING
Citation:
Van Remortel, R. D., R. W. Maichle, D T. Heggem, AND A M. Pitchford. AUTOMATED GIS WATERSHED ANALYSIS TOOLS FOR RUSLE/SEDMOD SOIL EROSION AND SEDIMENTATION MODELING. Presented at Environmental Monitoring and Assessment Program (EMAP) Symposium 2004, Newport, RI, May 3-7, 2004.
Impact/Purpose:
There are four basic objectives of the project:
Demonstrate the application of a comparative landscape assessment in analyzing the vulnerability of surface and coastal water conditions to declines based on landscape conditions (as estimated by landscape indicators as demonstrated in the mid-Atlantic landscape atlas) in western environments;
Develop and apply landscape assessment approaches relative to specific issues, including an ability to prioritize the vulnerability of areas relative to the Clean Water Act 303(d) designations; Quantify relationships between landscape conditions (as measured by landscape indicators) and surface and coastal waters in the west to reduce the uncertainty in comparative landscape assessments, and issue-specific, landscape assessments (e.g., Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDLs);
Complete a west-wide, comparative landscape assessment relative to surface and coastal water vulnerability;
Transfer landscape assessment technologies to Regional Offices so that they can conduct landscape assessments at many scales.
Description:
A comprehensive procedure for computing soil erosion and sediment delivery metrics has been developed using a suite of automated Arc Macro Language (AML ) scripts and a pair of processing- intensive ANSI C++ executable programs operating on an ESRI ArcGIS 8.x Workstation platform. The computing algorithms are rooted in the technical literature of the Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation (RUSLE) soil erosion modeling framework and the Spatially Explicit Delivery Model (SEDMOD) sediment delivery framework. This suite of software programs can be used to estimate the RUSLE-based soil erosion rate, the SEDMOD-based sediment delivery rate, and other ancillary soil and landform characteristics at multiple reporting scales. Beta versions of the programs are currently available for testing and evaluation.