Geospatial modeling and mapping of soil erosion in India

Abstract

Soil erosion generally removes the topmost fertile layer of soil, affecting agricultural productivity on a larger scale. As a significant portion of the Indian economy depends on agricultural productivity, granular assessment of the impact of soil erosion becomes critical. However, a national-scale assessment of soil erosion and an impact classification system currently doesn’t exist over India. Given the resource-intensive and time-consuming nature of field experiments required for the measurement of soil loss across a vast country, the Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation (RUSLE) was extensively utilized for soil erosion calculations due to its simplicity, streamlined data requirements, and accuracy. This study estimates the yearly potential soil loss throughout India at a spatial resolution of 250 m and quantifies its variability considering districts, soil texture, soil type, land use and land cover, and basins. The relative importance of individual and combined impact of multiple parameters on quantified soil loss has been assessed using a random forest model. Rainfall erosivity (R-factor) emerges as the most crucial feature in estimating soil erosion in Indian conditions while rainfall intensity, combined with the topographic factor, demonstrated the highest influence on soil erosion in Indian conditions when the combined impact was assessed. Further, we mapped the Sediment Delivery Ratio (SDR) and Specific Sediment Yield (SSY) to assess the actual soil loss reaching downstream of basins across the national boundary. The national mean values for Sediment Delivery Ratio (SDR) and Sediment Yield (SSY) stand at 0.11 and 2.61 tons per hectare per year, respectively. The yearly potential soil loss for India is calculated at 21 tons per hectare per year, and nine out of the twenty districts with the highest susceptibility to soil erosion are in the state of Assam. Finally, a novel impact-based erosion-severity classification system has been introduced which finds that 29.46% of the landmass is prone to minor erosion while 3.17% experiences catastrophic erosion. This is the first comprehensive national-scale assessment of both soil erosion and sediment yield mapping over India, and the consequent classification system will enable the planning and implementation of soil conservation strategies locally as well as nationally.