A determination of area of potential erosion by geographic information systems

Abstract Accelerated water erosion is the major problem of agricultural soils all over the world and also in the Slovak Republic. Accelerated erosion occurs in 55 % of agricultural land. It belongs to physical degradation of fertile land, and the whole process is irreversible. Therefore, it is very important to localize the presence of accelerated erosion and apply the basic principles of soil erosion control. Geographic information systems (GIS) are an effective tool for various environmental analyses, so it can also be succesfully used for determination of potential erosion intensity. The aim of this work was to create a map of domain areas that describes potential water erosion. As an area of interest the cadastral territory of Topolcianky in the Slovak Republic was selected. For this purpose the GIS software Arcview from ESRI was used. Water erosion process was modelled by universal soil loss equation (USLE) which computes an average annual soil loss. The limit values of acceptable intensity of soil l...