TY - GEN
T1 - Assessing RUSLE and hill-slope soil movement modeling in the central appalachians
AU - Wang, Jingxin
AU - Edwards, Pam
AU - Hamons, Greg W.
AU - Goff, William
N1 - Funding Information:
The story begins in the summer of 1999, shortly after the "failure" of ITSD to implement a CASE tool in a project (CAPELLA) supported by European funding. This antecedent failure is significant and will be returned to in the "Discussion." More details of CAPELLA may be found in Kautz et al. (1999), with a recent analysis of its miscarriage appearing in McMaster and Wastell (2004). In short, CAPELLA foundered because key stakeholders (practitioners especially) were uncommitted to the use of the CASE tool, which became increasingly seen as marginal to the urgent, practical problems facing ITSD (e.g., Y2K, legacy system maintenance). Of particular salience here was the clarion call in CAPELLA's final report for "strong alignment of the introduction of new technologies [with] short term demands [and] long term business goals" (Williams and Willetts 1999, p. 3). The report went on to recommend the adoption of a new systems development methodology. The need for a more business-oriented approach had also been articulated in the City's Information Society Strategy, published earlier that year. The Strategy's aim was to harness the potential of IT to improve the social and economic well-being of the people of Salford. It was recognized that a business process reengineering (BPR) approach was required to implement the strategy, focusing on the innovative use of IT to realize radical business change. Quoting again from the CAPELLA report: Externally, requirements from Central Government to improve services and provide greater value for money, involving constant re-engineering of business processes, has placed Information Technology in a position of increasing expectations to aid such transformations...not only in delvering improved products, but in strengthening its capacity in coping with changes arising for new demands and expectations. (Williams and Willetts 1999, pp. 5-6) The miscarriage of CAPELLA and the publication of the Information Society Strategy form key antecedent features of the local context. It is also important to consider change events in the wider environment of the sector as a whole (Meyer et al. 1995). Here the most potent forces relate to the emergence of eGovemment in the UK, which may be traced back to the publication of the central government's 1999 white paper, "Modernising Government" (Cabinet Office 1999). This challenged all public sector organizations (including local government) to deliver efficient and responsive citizen-centered services, and IT was seen as critical to achieving these aims. The ambitiousness of the agenda was reflected in the target to electronically enable 100 percent of relevant services, initially by 2008 but subsequently accelerated to 2005. Various national initiatives lent force to the modernization program. A so-called "Pathfinder" initiative was launched in 2001, whereby significant new funding was set aside for local authorities able to demonstrate a leading position in relation to some aspect of eGovemment.
PY - 2010
Y1 - 2010
N2 - The determination of the topographical attributes responsible for the origination and transfer of sediment were investigated in a central Appalachian mixed hardwood forest from 2002 through 2005. Two study watersheds were chosen on the left fork of Clover Run within the Indian Run watershed in Tucker County, West Virginia. Silt fence was installed around all the stream channels within both watersheds to ensure all sediment material delivered from adjacent hill-slopes was captured and collected. Visual, physical, and spatial observations were made before, during, and after road construction within the treatment watershed. Data were analyzed both spatially and statistically to determine the magnitude of effects from the topographical attributes, the road construction, and the harvesting operations on sediment delivery to the stream channel. The Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation (RUSLE) was tested to compare modeled results to field measured results under these mountainous conditions. The soil loss equation displayed poor accuracy, yielding predictions hundreds of times larger than the actual masses of collected data. The modeled estimate for the treatment watershed was 2.68 tons per-acre per-year, while the modeled estimate for the control watershed was 2.86 tons per-acre per-year. However, the treatment watershed actually produced 0.01, 0.02, 0.03 and 0.01 tons per-acre, respectively; while the control watershed produced 0.002, 0.001, 0.005, and 0.003 tons per-acre, respectively, for 2002 through 2005. The poor performance of the RUSLE may be attributed to several factors, particularly the extremely variable conditions that exist within Appalachian forested watersheds which may reach outside the predictive capabilities of the RUSLE.
AB - The determination of the topographical attributes responsible for the origination and transfer of sediment were investigated in a central Appalachian mixed hardwood forest from 2002 through 2005. Two study watersheds were chosen on the left fork of Clover Run within the Indian Run watershed in Tucker County, West Virginia. Silt fence was installed around all the stream channels within both watersheds to ensure all sediment material delivered from adjacent hill-slopes was captured and collected. Visual, physical, and spatial observations were made before, during, and after road construction within the treatment watershed. Data were analyzed both spatially and statistically to determine the magnitude of effects from the topographical attributes, the road construction, and the harvesting operations on sediment delivery to the stream channel. The Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation (RUSLE) was tested to compare modeled results to field measured results under these mountainous conditions. The soil loss equation displayed poor accuracy, yielding predictions hundreds of times larger than the actual masses of collected data. The modeled estimate for the treatment watershed was 2.68 tons per-acre per-year, while the modeled estimate for the control watershed was 2.86 tons per-acre per-year. However, the treatment watershed actually produced 0.01, 0.02, 0.03 and 0.01 tons per-acre, respectively; while the control watershed produced 0.002, 0.001, 0.005, and 0.003 tons per-acre, respectively, for 2002 through 2005. The poor performance of the RUSLE may be attributed to several factors, particularly the extremely variable conditions that exist within Appalachian forested watersheds which may reach outside the predictive capabilities of the RUSLE.
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M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:78649697037
SN - 9781617388354
T3 - American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers Annual International Meeting 2010, ASABE 2010
SP - 658
EP - 672
BT - American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers Annual International Meeting 2010, ASABE 2010
PB - American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers
ER -