Soil Erosion Prediction at the Water Reservoir’s Basin of Pineios Dam, Western Greece, Using the Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation (RUSLE) and GIS

It’s widely known that the procedures of soil erosion are affected by a number of physical and human factors and are appeared with different intensities in different places. However, the spatial and temporal scales of these procedures are still poorly understood. Therefore, the control and prediction of soil erosion and deposition are a complex and difficult task. It is necessary to improve the understanding of these procedures, taking into account their quantitative expression, in order to be able to analyze the impacts of soil erosion. In the current study, an effort to estimate potential annual soil loss has been conducted with the use of the Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation (RUSLE) adopted in a Geographical Information System (GIS) framework and applied at the water reservoir’s basin of Pineios earth-filled dam, Western Greece. Data entry of the RUSLE factors in GIS resulted to the estimation of annual soil loss equal to SE=23.39 t/ha. A significant amount of this volume has been deposited in the dam’s water-reservoir resulting in the perennial dysfunction of the dam.