Spatial data of Soil erosion in Korea

Abstract

Soil is reported as a finite resource, and research studies are being conducted worldwide to reduce the continuously accelerated soil erosion caused by climate change. In this article, preliminary assessment of annual average soil erosion caused by rainfall in Korea was performed using a modeling technique, the Universal Soil Loss Equation (USLE) recommended by the Ministry of Environment's Notice No. 2015-138. USLE is used globally for erosion prediction and control. For model input data, spatial data (90m DEM, soil map, land classification map, meteorological data, etc.) provided by the national agency were reconstructed using ArcGIS 10.5.1. As a result of analyzing the spatial characteristics of the annual average soil erosion, 69.62% is less than 50 tons/ha, 17.48% is 50–100 tons/ha, 9.69% is 100-200 tons/ha, and 3.21% was calculated to exceed 200 tons/ha. There is few data that can quantitatively compare with this result, so it was not possible to perform a calibration. It will be necessary to accurately evaluate this through various monitoring methods based on geological characteristics in the future, and there is also a need to upgrade spatial data quality.

Keywords

• soil erosion
• usle
• spatial data