Journal of Korean Society of Agricultural Engineers ISSN:1738-3692(Print) 2093-7709(Online) 한국농공학회논문집

The need to predict the rate of soil erosion, both under existing conditions and those expected to occur following soil conservation practice, has been led to the development of various models. In this study Morgan model especially developed for field-sized areas on hill slopes was applied to assess the rate of soil erosion using RS/GIS environment in the Dukchun river basin, one of two tributaries flowing into Jinyang lake. In order to run the model, land cover mapping was made by the supervised classification method with Landsat TM satellite image data, the digital soil map was generated from scanning and screen digitizing from the hard copy of soil maps, digital elevation map (DEM) in order to generate the slope map was made by the digital map (DM) produced by National Geographic Information Institute (NGII). Almost all model parameters were generated to the multiple raster data layers, and the map calculation was made by the raster based GIS software, IL WIS which was developed by ITC, the Netherlands. Model results show that the annual soil loss rates are 5.2, 18.4, 30.3, 58.2 and 60.2 ton/ha/year in forest, paddy fields, built-up area, bare soil, and upland fields respectively. The estimated rates seemed to be high under the normal climatic conditions because of exaggerated land slopes due to DEM generation using 100 m contour interval. However, the results were worthwhile to estimate soil loss in hilly areas and the more precise result could be expected when the more accurate slope data is available.