Assessment of Soil Erosion and its Correlation with Landslide Incidents using Geospatial Techniques

Abstract

The present attempt is made to assess soil erosion and its relationship to landslide incidents in the Panchganga river basin using geospatial techniques. The RUSLE model is used for assessing soil erosion and the FR model is employed for correlation analysis. The static and dynamic components of RUSLE are obtained using multi-source information and an integrated analysis is conducted in the ArcGIS software environment. Landslides are detected using remote sensing datasets and the change detection approach. According to the results of the soil erosion model, 81 % of the study area has a very low risk of erosion while about 21 % has a high and very high risk. The average rate of soil loss in the basin is 83 t/ha/yr. In the correlation analysis, the ratio represents the region where landslides took place to a specific area of an erosion-prone zone. As per the findings, the correlation between soil erosion and landslide incidences indicates that areas with high and very high erosion zones have a higher probability of landslides. The ROC is used to assess the correlation between the soil erosion model and landslide occurrence. According to the assessment results, the AUC indicates an 0.89 correlation between the resulting soil erosion model and landslides.