Performance of RS and GIS systems in estimating wind erosion in east coast of Urmia Lake

Wind erosion is one of the important aspects of land degradation in arid and semi-arid regions and is a serious challenge to sustainable production and land management. In this study, a comprehensive evaluation model is developed which proves to be effective with an overall precision of 66.12% to estimate soil erosion on the eastern shore of Urmia Lake. Six critical factors including soil erodibility, aridity index, soil crustal indices, vegetation fraction, wind field intensity and snow cover days are employed to model the wind erosion. 153 soil samples randomly were collected from 0-10 cm depth points from three elevation layers (1271-1273, 1273-1275 and 1275-1278 meter above sea level) and transfer to laboratory for physical and chemical analyzing. The AHP method is applied to determine the weight of each factor in a multi-criteria system, during the years 2005–2017 and poor vegetation cover with low annual variations was identified as the most important factor affecting the wind erosion model. Results show that high, low and moderate erosion classes have 0.76, 0.64 and 0.57 overall accuracy, respectively. The reason of low accuracy of low and medium erosion classes was the lower number of field observation points of these classes. The results shows that 45.56% of the study area classified as severe wind erosion class (WEI <0.53), while 23.97% has erosion Moderate (0.48> WEI> 0.53) and 30.47% have been labeled as low erosion (0.48> WEI). Consequently, the accuracy of the overall assessment of soil erosion model developed in this study is acceptable and could be applied in the eastern part of Lake Urmia. Results shows the descending trend in erosion intensity from the middle parts to the north and south parts of the study area.