Improving approaches to assessing soil erosion using GIS technologies

Abstract

Regardless of how much the Kazakhstan authorities advertise the country’s oil and gas “abundance”, it was and remains an agrarian country, and thus its main resource is land. Unfortunately, nowadays because of violation of agricultural technology, non-observance of water regime, lack of funds for land reclamation, low culture of farming, weak agricultural education and influence of natural factors, soil erosion is aggravated on two thirds of the territory of the country. Soil is an inexhaustible natural resource that plays an important role in global food production. It is estimated that 2.6 billion people suffer from soil degradation and desertification this means that over one hundred countries suffer from over 33% of the Earth’s surface. Unless new approaches are implemented, the total arable and fertile land per capita in 2050 will be only a quarter of what it was in 1960. The article aims to assess the soil erosion propensity of the Semey test site territory using Geographic Information System (GIS), Earth Remote Sensing (ERS), and Spectral Indices (SI). In the course of these studies, the SI maps of the study area, soil erosion assessment maps combined with GIS-technology and remote sensing of the studied mathematical models and proposed a model for assessing soil erosion were developed on the basis of these methods.