Development of Sediment Assessment Tool for Effective Erosion Control (SATEEC) in Small Scale Watershed

The Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation (RUSLE) has been used in over 100 countries to estimate potential long-term soil erosion from the field. However, the RUSLE estimated soil erosion cannot be used to estimate the sediment delivered to the stream networks. For an effective erosion control, it is necessary to compute sediment delivery ratio (SDR) for watershed and sediment yield at watershed outlet. Thus, the Sediment Assessment Tool for Effective Erosion Control (SATEEC) was developed in this study to compute the sediment yield at any point in the watershed. To compute spatially distributed sediment yield map, the RUSLE was first integrated with the ArcView GIS and three area based sediment delivery ratio methods were incorporated in the SATEEC. The SATEEC was applied to the Bangdong watershed, Chuncheon, Gangwon Province to demonstrate how it can be used to estimate soil loss and sediment yield for a watershed. The sediment yield using USDA SDR method is 8,544 ton/year and 4,949 ton/year with the method by Boyce. Thus, use of watershed specific SDR is highly recommended when comparing the estimated sediment yield with the measured sediment data. The SATEEC was applied with hypothetical cropping scenario and it was found that the SATEEC can be used to assess the impacts of different management on the sediment delivered to the stream networks and to find the sediment source areas for a reach of interest. The SATEEC is an efficient tool to find the best erosion control practices with its easy-to-use interface.