Improving the Water
Erosion Prediction Project (WEPP) Model
Over the last decade, researchers at Washington State University have been continually developing and improving the USDA’s Water Erosion Prediction Project (WEPP) model. In close collaboration with the USDA-Agricultural Research Service-Paciic West Area (ARS-PWA), the USDA-Forest Service (FS), and the USDA-ARS-National Soil Erosion Research Laboratory (NSERL), the research team, led by Dr. Joan Wu, associate professor in biological systems engineering, has carried out studies involving laboratory and ield investigation and computer simulation of soil erosion by water. Special efforts have been devoted to reining WEPP’s winter hydrology routine and enhancing the model’s applicability to a broad range of hydrologic conditions.
Designed by the USDA-ARS as a replacement for the empirical Universal Soil Loss Equation (USLE), the physically-based WEPP model has the potential to provide reliable prediction of soil erosion by water, and thus help to alleviate associated environmental and economic impact. WEPP’s most notable advantages include its capabilities for estimating spatial and temporal distributions of soil detachment anddeposition on an event or continual basis. Thus, WEPP can better account for site-speciic conditions that the USLE cannot. Even though WEPP holds numerous advantages over its predecessor, Wu says that it is “not yet fully appreciated and broadly applied due to the increased model complexity and demand in input data.”
To increase the model’s applicability, researchers at the USDA-ARS- NSERL (Dr. Dennis Flanagan and Jim Frankenberger), USDA- FS (Dr. William Elliot), and USDA-ARS-PWA (Dr. Don McCool) have developed user-friendly interfaces and extensive databases for general WEPP users. “Today, it is possible for a farmer to download the model on a laptop or access it via the Internet,” something that was impossible to do during its initial inception in the 1980s, as Wu has pointed out. In addition, continual research efforts for improving accuracy should ultimately make WEPP the desired tool for quantifying soil erosion.
Shuhui Dun, doctoral student and graduate research associate, has been
working closely with Wu modifying
the WEPP codes and making WSU
the main contributor to WEPP’s
recent releases, which are accessible to the public at the USDA-ARS
Web site (www.ars.usda.gov). In
collaboration with Professor Don
McCool, Wu’s team (Cory Greer,
Hanxue Qiu, and Prabhakar Singh)
has also carried out laboratory and
ield investigation of water erosion.
A series of scientiic publications
presenting recent progress on
improving WEPP and case
applications
has been
published.
In addition
to U.S.
federal
agencies,
Wu’s team
collaborates
broadly
with other
universities in
and outside the United States.
An application of the WEPP model
to an experimental watershed in the
Apennines Mountain Range, Italy,
has generated promising results and
the work has appeared in a recent
issue of The Journal of Hydrology.
Considering that the total cost for soil erosion damage in the United States is estimated at $40 billion per year, WSU researchers are optimistic that the combined advantages of a physically-based model and the user-friendly interface will spur its popularity in the United States.
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