Abstract:

As one of global scale environmental problem, soil erosion has led land degradation, agricultural reduction, ecosystem function digression, and has been the theme of much research all the times. At present, lots of study methods of soil erosion have been developed, e.g. the application of runoff plots systems, isotopes tracer technique, rare earth elements (REE) tracer technique, soil erosion modeling, and the evaluation methods based on remote sensing (RS) and surveying techniques. Each method has the unique advantage and suit specific spatial scale. The technique of isotopes and REE tracer suit hillslope and watershed scales, have the advantage of comprehending soil erosion process, and serve as the basis for soil erosion model building and validating. Whereas, with the help of GIS and RS, soil erosion model can be used to evaluate and predict the spatial pattern of soil loss and sediment yield on regional scale. At last, suggestions for future researches on soil erosion were made, stating that it is essential to integrate different research technique to intensify the study of soil erosion process and mechanism, model building for fast forecasting soil erosion on large spatial scale.