Erosión y desertificación.-USLE, RUSLE and WEPP models used in mining restored hillslopes

Abstract

ABSTRACT One of the main problems affecting mining restoration is erosion, which limits the development of functional soils and plant communities. The eroded sediment pollutes and degrades the natural river systems. The objective of this work is to test some of the most used models: USLE (Wischmeier and Smith, 1965, 1978) and RUSLE 1.06 (Toy and Foster, 1998) and WEPP (Nearing et al., 1989), for the case of slopes derived from mining reclamation. The study area is a dump in El Moral coalmine (Utrillas), 60 km. north of Teruel city. We selected three artificial slopes, one with a topsoil substrate and two overburdencovered in order to measure the sediment production during a year. After the comparison between estimated and measured erosion rates two conclusions can be stated: a) RUSLE 1.06 gives the best estimations in most of the cases. However WEPP in its annual option and for the topsoiled slope, works better than RUSLE1.06.