Applying GIS to catchment-scale soil erosion modelling

Most catchment-scale soil erosion models require an explicit spatial representation of the heterogeneity of inputs such as topography, soil conditions and land cover, to capture the within-area variations in movements as well as outflows. The basic spatial units adopted for this range from fields to grid cells. There is an increasing number of examples of soil erosion models being linked to or embedded within both commercial and in-house written Geographical Information Systems (GIS). The functionality of these systems support the generation and storage of data for the models, as well as allowing the spatial relationships between soil erosion processes and form to be explored. There are a number limitations with using GIS in this work. Many of the problems are associated with the lack of spatial data available to support the modelling.