Abstract:
Soil erosion is a major form of soil erosion degradation and is one of the severe environmental problem. Modelling of soil erosion has been proven to be cost effective and efficient form of technology to analyze and predict soil erosion from different land use practices. The WEPP model is regarded as one of the new technology in soil loss estimation and prediction since it’s process base and predictive in spatial and temporal scales. It can be used to estimate soil loss hourly, monthly or annually from single storms, multiple rainfall events from a variety of land use practices.
The WEPP model can be used to simulate the various physical processes important in soil erosion including runoff, raindrop and flow detachment, sediment transport, deposition and residue decomposition. It can be used for common hillslope applications. This is an advantage over the existing erosion prediction technology, with the most notable advantage being the ability to estimate spatial and temporal distributions of soil loss, and since it’s a process based model, it can be extrapolated to a broad range of conditions that may not be practically economical.
This research discusses the application of the WEPP model to estimate soil erosion from an annual series of multiple rainfall events and under different types of land use. Soil loss is measured in ton/ha/year with the production of soil loss potential maps showing the regions within the study area which experiences the highest and the lowest soil loss rates. The soil loss rate in the year 2018 rises by a 10.52% from the year 2012. Results obtained from the six-year epoch in this research from the year 1988 to the year 2018, can be used efficiently to estimate the soil loss in the Sagana sub-basin by using the WEPP model of soil loss prediction.