A Geographic Information System(GIS) Approach for Modeling a Soil Erosion Map from Available Data

The Universal Soil Loss Equation (USLE) has been applied to the microcomputer based Geographic Information System (GIS) data planes to model a soil erosion map for a county. The conventional method applied by US Soil conservation Service (SCS) has been tedious and time consuming process on a mainframe computer which yields a multisectioned, hard to interprete, line printer map of the each county's soil loss. The new approach proved to be an economical and efficient tool for the natural resource managers in their decision malting in land conservation practice. They can simulate the variety of conservation practices and assess the cost and benefit without physically implementing the conservation measures.7he new approach also can produce all the other graphical and statistical reports.