Abstract:

Vegetation coverage plays an important role in decreasing soil loss, protecting environment and improving the standard of living. Therefore. It is very necessary to dynamically estimate the soil erosion in forest areas for guiding the environment protection activities. As the main information resources, remote sensing data can be applied widely for soil erosion estimation. In this paper, the main study focus on the methods of extracting landuse types by using remote sensing data, and estimating soil erosion using revised universal soil loss equation (RUSLE), for Chaocha forest area, Genhe Forestry Bureau of Inner Mongolia. Firstly, the land-use map of the site area was obtained using TM image. Secondly, slope map was created from digital elevation model(DEM). Thirdly, the flow accumulation for the site was calculated using DEM data with ArcVeiw software, and then compute the slope length_slope factor and average soil loss. Finally, based on the soil erosion intensity classification, soil erosion intensity map was obtained. The soil erosion and its spatial distribution were quantitatively analysed. The result shows that under present conditions, about 90% of the land in the site area was classified as stable, while 10 percent was at the level of high erosion or greater. The main deciding factor in this area was slope.

Key words: remote sensing data, vegetation factor, soil erosion, drainage area analysis, USLE model