Vegetation Cover Plays the Most Important Role in Soil Erosion Control

Abstract

To obtain, characteristics and behaviors of soil erosion phenomena, to control it's harms and reduce it's risks, realistic data from soil erosion rates are necessary. Mean while, measuring soil erosion rates particularly in large scale is a time consuming and expensive task. Moreover, spatial and temporal changes of soil erosion increase this problem. Therefore, to find out a certain way of creating capable methods which easily and quickly be able to estimate soil erosion rate, is quite logical. So, different models are widely used, but, may be the most important consideration with this regard is that, these models should be previously, tested and adopted to defined areas to stop probability of causing some huge and meaningful errors. Therefore, to achieve the above mentioned aim, different methods are used. Anyway, conditions which resulted to create a suitable model, should be considered in a defined area where, model is applied, unless, model application can leads to huge risks. This study is an attempt with this refer, that is, with comparing measured soil loss rates and predicted soil erosion rates from a defined catchment area, created a reasonable relationship between them and achieved the main aim of the study. That is, one of the small upland catchments of Emam kandi of Urmia with 75 ha area which is part of the Urmia lake catchment area and under layned by calcareous parent material, is selected as a study site. Selected catchment has natural pasture and has closured during the recent years. To calculate sediment yield the following processes were done: first, estimating the volume of trapped sediments, then, surveying the catchment area, for calculating sediment yield. Measured sediment yield is 6.19 t ha(-1) year(-1) which leads to soil loss rate of 13.76 t ha(-1) year(-1) by using Sediment Delivery Ratio (SDR). Also, inside the measurement of sediment yields and calculation of soil loss rates, two models of MUSLE and PSIAC were used respectively after exclosure and before exclosure to predict soil loss rates. Predicted soil loss rates by MUSLE and PSIAC respectively are 12.80 and 26.5 t ha(-1) year(-1). Finally, Comparisons and statistical analysis and scientific discussions were made.