Possibilities of including surface runoff barriers in the slope-length factor calculation in the GIS environment and its integration in the user-friendly LS-RUSLE tool

Jiří Brychta and Martina Brychtová
Additional contact information
Jiří Brychta: Department of Geography, Faculty of Science, J. E. Purkyně University, Ústí nad Labem, Czech Republic
Martina Brychtová: Department of Land Use and Improvement, Faculty of Environment, Czech University of Life Sciences Prague, Prague, Czech Republic

Soil and Water Research, 2020, vol. 15, issue 4, 246-257

Abstract: The effect of the morphology is key aspect of erosion modelling. In Universal Soil Loss Equation (USLE) type methods, this effect is expressed by the topographic factor (LS). The LS calculation in GIS is performed by a unit contributing area (UCA) method and can mainly be influenced by the pixel resolution, by the flow direction algorithm and by the inclusion of a hydrologically closed unit (HCU) principle, the cutoff slope angle (CSA) principle and the ephemeral gullies extraction (EG) principle. This research presents a new LS-RUSLE tool created with the inclusion of these principles in the automatic user-friendly GIS tool. The HCU principle using a specific surface runoff interruption algorithm, based on pixels with NoData values at the interruption points (pixels), appears to be key. With this procedure, the occurrence of overestimation results by flow conversion was rapidly reduced. Additionally, the reduction of extreme L and LS values calculated in the GIS environment was reached by the application of the CSA and EG principles. The results of the LS-RUSLE model show the prospective use of this tool in practice.

Keywords: cutoff slope angle; hydrologically closed unit; L factor; LS factor; unit contributing area (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://swr.agriculturejournals.cz/doi/10.17221/128/2019-SWR.html (text/html)
http://swr.agriculturejournals.cz/doi/10.17221/128/2019-SWR.pdf (application/pdf)
free of charge

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:caa:jnlswr:v:15:y:2020:i:4:id:128-2019-swr

DOI: 10.17221/128/2019-SWR

Access Statistics for this article

Soil and Water Research is currently edited by Ing. Markéta Knížková, (Executive Editor)

More articles in Soil and Water Research from Czech Academy of Agricultural Sciences
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Ivo Andrle ().