International Journal of Geosciences, 2013, 4, 11-23 http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/ijg.2013.41002 Published Online January 2013 (http://www.scirp.org/journal/ijg) Assessment of Soil Loss of the Dhalai River Basin, Tripura, India Using USLE Kapil Ghosh, Sunil Kumar De*, Shreya Bandyopadhyay, Sushmita Saha Department of Geography and Disaster Management, Tripura University, Suryamaninagar, India Email: *
[email protected] Received September 27, 2012; revised November 12, 2012; accepted December 11, 2012 ABSTRACT Soil erosion is one of the most important environmental problems, and it remains as a major threat to the land use of hilly regions of Tripura. The present study aims at estimating potential and actual soil loss (t·h−1·y−1) as well as to in- dentify the major erosion prone sub-watersheds in the study area. Average annual soil loss has been estimated by multi- plying five parameters, i.e.: R (the rainfall erosivity factor), K (the soil erodibility factor), LS (the topographic factor), C (the crop management factor) and P (the conservation support practice). Such estimation is based on the principles de- fined in the Universal Soil Loss Equation (USLE) with some modifications. This intensity of soil erosion has been di- vided into different priority classes. The whole study area has been subdivided into 23 sub watersheds in order to iden- tify the priority areas in terms of the intensity of soil erosion. Each sub-watershed has further been studied intensively in terms of rainfall, soil type, slope, land use/land cover and soil erosion to determine the dominant factor leading to higher erosion.