Estimating Soil Losses from Saemangeum Watershed based on Cropping Systems

A Geographic Information System (GIS) was developed to estimate basin-wide soil losses using the Universal Soil Loss Equation (USLE). It was applied to estimate the annual average soil losses from the Saemangeum watershed. The USLE factors for each subarea of uniform land use and treatments were estimated from the GIS routines from digital topographic maps, land cover and detailed soil maps. A routine was developed to estimate the averaged cropping management factors (C) of USLE for multi-cropping farmlands, based on cropping system records from the district offices. The resulting C factors ranged from 0.28 to 0.35 for multi-cropping areas. The estimated annual average soil loss was approximately 2.9 million tonnes. Typical soil losses from different land uses were 0.8 t/ha at paddies, 33.7 t/ha at uplands and 1.1 t/ha from forested mountains. It was also found that 6.0% of the arable land of the watershed possessed high risks of soil losses, and conservation measures were needed to reduce soil losses.