Progress Report: Visualization of Sheet and Rill Erosion on US Cropland

Abstract

National Resource Inventory (NRI) is a longitudinal survey which monitors national resources on non-federal US land. It provides annual national and state-level estimates of average water erosion on cropland. Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) did some primitive attempt to visualize sheet and rill erosion rates on US cropland every 5 years. Their maps represent a surface model based on a neighbor interpolation of all NRI sample sites. We'd like to improve on their work by producing annual maps with a predictive model based on data from NRI Pointgen, USGS Land Cover, and National Cooperative Soil Survey. The project is in progress and I'll show some of our experimental results.