Abstract
Soil erosion is a major form of land degradation and has been recognised as a severe environmental problem since late 18th century. Mathematical modelling of soil erosion has been proven to be a cost effective technology to predict soil erosion from different land use practices. The Water Erosion Prediction Project (WEPP) is regarded as one of a new generation of soil erosion models as it is process based and predicts soil erosion at spatial and temporal scales. In addition, WEPP is applicable for hillslopes as well as small watersheds and estimates soil erosion in hourly, monthly or annual timestamps from single storm or multiple storm rainfall events from variety of land use practices. This paper discusses the application of WEPP to estimate soil erosion from the single storm rainfall event with different soil conditions. Soil erosion is measured from the erosion plot experiments carried out at the University of Western Sydney using large-scale rainfall simulators. Experiments were carried out in dispersive clayey soil and permeable sandy soil with three common land use practices to represent the construction sites in New South Wales. Soil, land use and climate data obtained from the experiment and collected from secondary sources were used as input to the model. Predicted soil loss values were compared with corresponding measured ones. Results obtained from 22 different runs show that WEPP can efficiently estimate soil erosion due to single storm rainfall event from construction sites.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | SuperSoil 2004: Proceedings of the 3rd Australian and New Zealand Joint Soils Conference, 5-9 December 2004, University of Sydney, Australia |
| Publisher | Supersoil |
| Number of pages | 8 |
| ISBN (Print) | 1920842268 |
| Publication status | Published - 2004 |
| Event | Australian and New Zealand Joint Soils Conference - Duration: 1 Jan 2004 → … |
Conference
| Conference | Australian and New Zealand Joint Soils Conference |
|---|---|
| Period | 1/01/04 → … |
Keywords
- soil erosion
- mathematical models
- building sites
- environmental sciences
- construction industry
- environment and sustainability
- New South Wales
- Australia
- storms
- Western Sydney (N.S.W.)
- rain and rainfall
- Centre for Western Sydney