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ARS Home » Pacific West Area » Tucson, Arizona » SWRC » Research » Publications at this Location » Publication #86511
Title: RUSLE USERS GUIDE

Author
item Foster, George
item Renard, Kenneth
item YODER, D - UNIV. OF TENNESSEE
item McCool, Donald
item WEESIES, G - NRCS

Submitted to: Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation Users Manual
Publication Type: Other
Publication Acceptance Date: 3/12/1997
Publication Date: N/A
Citation: N/A

Interpretive Summary: Soil erosion prediction has been widely used by government agencies and other organizations in conservation planning to inventory erosion rates over large areas and to develop and implement public policy. the Universal Soil Loss Equation has proven to be an especially useful tool for dealing with sheet and rill erosion caused by rainfall and runoff. This equation, which has been used since the early 1960s, recently underwent a major revision that produced the Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation (RUSLE). This revision included recent research findings and is implemented in a computer program that can be run on personal computers. The RUSLE User's Guide is a manual that is distributed with the RUSLE computer program, and the guide is used to assist beginning and advanced RUSLE users in applying RUSLE to particular applications.

Technical Abstract: This manuscript is the User's Guide for the Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation (RUSLE) and the computer program that is used to compute factor values for the equation and soil loss with the equation. RUSLE is a major revision of the Universal Soil Loss Equation (USLE). Changes in RUSLE from the USLE include a much expanded erosivity map for the western U.S., seasonally varying erodibility values, new slope length and steepnes relationships based on the ratio of rill to interrill erosion, cover-management factor values computed from subfactors, and factor values supporting practices computed from equations describing basic erosion mechanics. The subfactors used in the cover-management are prior land use, canopy, surface cover, roughness, and antecedent soil moisture. This guide will be distributed with the RUSLE computer program by the Soil and Water Conservation Society and will be used to guide the choice of input values for RUSLE applications. Complete technical details on how RUSLE computes sheet and rill erosion are given in "Predicting Soil Erosion by Water: A guide to Conservation Planning with the Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation (RUSLE)," a U.S. Department of Agriculture Handbook published in March, 1997.