The Water Erosion Prediction Project (WEPP) model is a continuous simulation, process-based model that allows simulation of small watersheds and hillslope profiles within those watersheds for assessing various soil and water conservation management options for agricultural, rangeland, and forest sites. Beside the continuous improvement of the Windows WEPP interface for hillslope and small watersheds, additional work is in progress to allow WEPP simulations based on using digital sources of information through the linkage with Geographic Information Systems (GIS). The Geo-spatial interface for WEPP (GeoWEPP) utilizes digital geo-referenced information such as digital elevation models (DEM) and topographical maps to derive and prepare valid model input parameters and defaults to start site-specific soil and water conservation planning for a small watershed with a single soil and land use for each sub-catchment. The integration of orthophotos, soil surveys, land use maps, climate data, and precision farming data as well as multiple soil and land use within each sub-catchment is currently under development. The goal of the GeoWEPP project is to provide a series of interfaces for users with different levels of GIS knowledge that are capable to utilizing these different data sources in a standard format either provided by GIS users, by precision farmers with Global Positioning Systems (GPS) databases and/or through accessing commonly readily available U.S.-nationwide data sets that are free of charge.
Commonly Available Data Sources
Watch: Learn some essentials about soil erosion from the US Forest Service
