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Distributed evaluation of the contribution of soil erosion to the sediment yield from a watershed
Author(s) -
Pilotti Marco,
Bacchi Baldassare
Publication year - 1997
Publication title -
earth surface processes and landforms
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.294
H-Index - 127
eISSN - 1096-9837
pISSN - 0197-9337
DOI - 10.1002/(sici)1096-9837(199724)22:13<1239::aid-esp839>3.0.co;2-k
Subject(s) - watershed , erosion , sediment , deposition (geology) , hydrology (agriculture) , wepp , environmental science , digital elevation model , drainage basin , soil conservation , scale (ratio) , geology , computer science , geotechnical engineering , geomorphology , remote sensing , ecology , agriculture , geography , cartography , machine learning , biology
The correct determination of the sediment yield from a basin is of paramount importance in several hydraulic and environmental applications, such as the evaluation of the storage reduction of artificial reservoirs. However, due to the highly episodic nature of sediment supply and transport in many environments and to the extreme complexity of the processes involved, the evaluation of the sediment load in a river is still highly uncertain. When the time scale of interest is sufficiently long, and when the primary sediment source comes from distributed erosion in the watershed, the problem can be tackled in an indirect fashion, by computing the contribution to the annual suspended yield from soil erosion. In order to accomplish this task, we propose a distributed application of the widely used USLE formula. The formula is automatically applied along drainage networks derived from a digital elevation model and properly modified to take into account the presence of deposition zones in the watershed. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.