Assessment of soil erosion due to windmill establishment on Chatrigudda hillock near Vani Vilasa Sagara reservoir, South India

Soil erosion is an inexorable process of land degradation affecting economy and environment of the region. Assessment of soil erosion is important for planning and implementing conservational practice in the affected region. In the present study, Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation (RUSLE) integrated with remote sensing (RS) and Geographical Information System (GIS) were employed to estimate soil loss in Chatrigudda, a hillock located near Vani Vilasa Sagara Reservoir (VVS) in the central part of Karnataka, India. The RUSLE factors were obtained through pre-recorded meteorological data and data from field survey as well as from remote sensing. ESRI ArcGIS version 10.2 software was employed to delineate the windmill-established site of Vani Vilasa Sagara reservoir and digital elevation model (DEM) with 30 m resolution raster was used to develop the drainage and contour map through hydrology tool. The soil erosion map was created using the "Kriging method" in the GIS platform's geostatistical analyst tool. The RUSLE method estimated that annual soil loss in the region ranged from 0.33 to 40.89 t ha-1 year-1, with an average annual soil loss of 7.04 tha1yr1. The majority of the region (%) experiences only minor erosion (5 t ha-1 year-1). Moderate (5–10 t ha-1 year-1) to very high (20–40 t ha-1 year-1) and severe (40–80 t ha-1 year-1) erosions occurred in areas where high human interventions were made to construct roads for windmills. We believe that the computed soil erosion results from RUSLE will be useful in developing land management strategies to reduce the extent of soil degradation in the hillock.