A Remote Sensing Based Method to Detect Soil Erosion in Forests

Hanqiu Xu; Xiujuan Hu; Huade Guan; Bobo Zhang; Meiya Wang; Shanmu Chen; Minghua Chen

doi:10.3390/rs11050513

Remote Sensing (Mar 2019)

A Remote Sensing Based Method to Detect Soil Erosion in Forests

Hanqiu Xu,
Xiujuan Hu,
Huade Guan,
Bobo Zhang,
Meiya Wang,
Shanmu Chen,
Minghua Chen

Affiliations

Hanqiu Xu: College of Environment and Resources; Institute of Remote Sensing Information Engineering; Key Laboratory of Spatial Data Mining & Information Sharing of Ministry of Education; Fujian Provincial Key Laboratory of Remote Sensing of Soil Erosion; Fuzhou University, Fuzhou 350116, China
Xiujuan Hu: College of Environment and Resources; Institute of Remote Sensing Information Engineering; Key Laboratory of Spatial Data Mining & Information Sharing of Ministry of Education; Fujian Provincial Key Laboratory of Remote Sensing of Soil Erosion; Fuzhou University, Fuzhou 350116, China
Huade Guan: National Centre for Groundwater Research and Training, College of Science and Engineering, Flinders University, Adelaide, SA 5001, Australia
Bobo Zhang: College of Environment and Resources; Institute of Remote Sensing Information Engineering; Key Laboratory of Spatial Data Mining & Information Sharing of Ministry of Education; Fujian Provincial Key Laboratory of Remote Sensing of Soil Erosion; Fuzhou University, Fuzhou 350116, China
Meiya Wang: College of Environment and Resources; Institute of Remote Sensing Information Engineering; Key Laboratory of Spatial Data Mining & Information Sharing of Ministry of Education; Fujian Provincial Key Laboratory of Remote Sensing of Soil Erosion; Fuzhou University, Fuzhou 350116, China
Shanmu Chen: Fujian Monitoring Station of Water and Soil Reservation, Fuzhou 350001, China
Minghua Chen: Fujian Monitoring Station of Water and Soil Reservation, Fuzhou 350001, China

DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/rs11050513
Journal volume & issue: Vol. 11, no. 5
p. 513

Abstract

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Rainwater-induced soil erosion occurring in the forest is a special phenomenon of soil erosion in many red soil areas. Detection of such soil erosion is essential for developing land management to reduce soil loss in areas including southern China and other red soil regions of the world. Remotely sensed canopy cover is often used to determine the potential of soil erosion over a large spatial scale, which, however, becomes less useful in forest areas. This study proposes a new remote sensing method to detect soil erosion under forest canopy and presents a case study in a forest area in southern China. Five factors that are closely related to soil erosion in forest were used as discriminators to develop the model. These factors include fractional vegetation coverage, nitrogen reflectance index, yellow leaf index, bare soil index and slope. They quantitatively represent vegetation density, vegetation health status, soil exposure intensity and terrain steepness that are considered relevant to forest soil erosion. These five factors can all be derived from remote sensing imagery based on related thematic indices or algorithms. The five factors were integrated to create the soil erosion under forest model (SEUFM) through Principal Components Analysis (PCA) or a multiplication method. The case study in the forest area in Changting County of southern China with a Landsat 8 image shows that the first principal component-based SEUFM achieves an overall accuracy close to 90%, while the multiplication-based model reaches 81%. The detected locations of soil erosion in forest provide the target areas to be managed from further soil loss. The proposed method provides a tool to understand more about soil erosion in forested areas where soil erosion is usually not considered an issue. Therefore, the method is useful for soil conservation in forest.

Published in Remote Sensing

ISSN: 2072-4292 (Online)
Publisher: MDPI AG
Country of publisher: Switzerland
LCC subjects: Science
Website: http://www.mdpi.com/journal/remotesensing/

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