Regional Assessment of Soil Erosion Based on the Multivariate Membership Model

Regional-scale soil erosion assessment is important, but limited by the development of soil erosion model. This paper presents a new region-scaled soil erosion qualitative model: the multivariate membership model and the E´Dong Mountain is selected as case study area. The model chooses the four factor indexes affected erosion intensity: precipitation of rainy periods , slope gradients, percentage of vegetation cover and land use type, then construct the multivariate membership function and rank the fuzzy sets of erosion intensity class based on fuzzy mathematics processing the observed sample data. The result has shown that the model can obtain the good correlation between the erosion intensity and erosion controlling factors in theory. In addition, multi-resource data are integrated into ArcInfo system (a GIS platform) to generate the map of soil erosion intensity of study area based on the model. Thus, the model provides a new method for assessing the soil erosion in regional scale.