GIS based risk modeling of soil erosion under different scenarios of land use change in Simly watershed of Pakistan
Keywords:
Soil erosion, land degradation, RUSLE, GIS and Remote SensingAbstract
Soil erosion is a major environmental problem threating to agriculture and water resource development both developed and developing countries. Like other countries in the world, Pakistan is also dominated by mountain regions, barani lands and desert and facing with soil erosion problems. In this study, Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation (RUSLE), GIS and Remote Sensing technique was used to map the spatial distribution of the soil erosion risk in the Simly watershed, Islamabad, Pakistan. In Simly watershed, about 14 tons/ha/yr average soil erosion has been resulted. Area covered under very low risk zone of soil erosion (0 - 1 tons/ha/yr) was calculated as 41% and area covered under very high risk zone (> 100 tons/ha/yr) was calculated as 1.2%. The soil erosion in the agricultural and range land corresponds to 20.2 tons/ha/yr and 27.5 tons/ha/yr respectively. The soil erosion was found maximum under steep slopes (>30 deg) followed by gentle slopes (5-15 deg). In scenario l, all the scrub forest is assumed to be converted into range land, in which case the soil erosion increases to about 68.7% from the base land use of year 2013. In scenario 2, all the range land is assumed to be converted into agriculture land which increased to about 13% under this scenario. In scenario 3, all the range land of base land use of the year 2013 is assumed to be converted into scrub forest and a decrease of about 16.4% from that of the base land use in this scenario. There is a need to develop different strategies to control soil erosion, methodologies must be characterized for alternate soil loss risk zone corresponding to the risk levels.
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