engleski

Effect of land cover/use change on soil erosion assessment in Dubračina catchment (Croatia)

The assessment of erosion intensity and sediment production using Erosion Potential Method was made for the Dubračina catchment, Croatia. During the extensive research and data collection, several data sources for the land cover/use map were available: Spatial Plan, Corine database and Landsat images. Landsat data source was included in the study to provide a more up-to-date and higher resolution assessment and was available also for various time periods. Different information sources imposed the need to choose one data source as the most appropriate through the acknowledgement of their differences and the effect on the model outputs. The analysis presented in this paper also includes the change in erosion intensity and sediment production between the past and the present time. For this purpose, the land cover categories for Dubračina catchment were derived from the Landsat images. The most noticeable spatial change in erosion intensity between the two-time series is on sub-catchments Slani Potok and Mala Dubračina, where the area affected by excessive erosion was found to increase from the past to present time. The overall decrease in average values for the sediment production is noted from the past to present time but this change in values was not found to be significant, in contrast to the change in the spatial distribution visible on the maps.

Erosion Potential Method, soil erosion, erosion intensity, erosion sediment production, various data sources, changes in time, land cover/use

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