Abstract:
Soil erosion release system is an important tool for quantitative research in soil erosion process and is regarded as a frontier domain in soil erosion discipline. Soil erosion release system has important scientific significance for estimating soil erosion rate and evaluating the efficiency of soil and water conservation measures. However, most of the existing soil erosion release systems just rely on few rainfall events during a year or use yearly average rainfall data to estimate the soil erosion degree. They can not describe what an average soil erosion event is, when and where soil erosion occurs and how soil erosion dynamically changes. In addition, they can not explain the effects of rainfall, topography, soil and crop managements, and temporal and spatial variation of an extreme event on soil erosion. As the latest research progress in soil erosion release system, Daily Erosion Project(DEP) could solve above-mentioned problems in the previous soil erosion release systems. Based on erosion model, geographic information, land use, vegetation change, by simulating daily precipitation, water runoff, detachment, soil loss, and combing with NEXRAD (Next-Generation Weather RADAR) cloud chart, DEP generates a chart of soil erosion condition with a step length of day. DEP can implement daily soil erosion release. As the first daily soil erosion release system, DEP has been applied successfully in USA. This paper gave a detailed introduction to DEP system, analyzed its application in the US, and discussed the research and application prospects of DEP in China's soil erosion release system.