WEPP Forest Road Erosion Predictor
Forest erosion can lead to topsoil loss, and also to damaging deposits of sediment in aquatic ecosystems. For this reason, forest managers must be able to estimate the erosion potential of both planned management activities and catastrophic events, in order to decide where to use limited funds to focus erosion control efforts. To meet this need, scientists from the Rocky Mountain Research Station and collaborators have spent over a decade developing a suite of online tools that can be used to predict erosion potential of forest alterations such as road building, forest management, and wildfire, as part of the Forest Service–Water Erosion Prediction Project (FS-WEPP). FS-WEPP is being continually refined, improved, and expanded upon to increase its usefulness, and to enable managers to run predictive watershed models for better land management decision-making and more desirable outcomes.
Road Erosion
- WEPP:Road for predicting erosion from roads—a chronic source of forest sediment—and estimating the average annual sediment delivery of a road or road network.
- WEPP: Road Batch for predicting erosion from multiple in-sloped or out-sloped forest roads.
Forest Management
- Disturbed WEPP for modeling erosion from many disturbed forest and rangeland erosion conditions (such as management activities), including low and high severity burns.
- Disturbed WEPP Batch display web page that describes and allows for downloading the Batch Disturbed WEPP Interface Excel spreadsheet
- Erosion Risk Management Tool (ERMiT) for estimating the amount of post-fire erosion and evaluating the effect of different erosion control treatments options.
- ERMiT Batch display web page that descibes and allows for downloading the Batch ERMiT Interface Excel spreadsheet
- Fuel Management (FuME) for synthesizing multiple WEPP runs associated with fuel management as described under the Disturbed WEPP applications.
- Tahoe Basin interface, a customized version of Disturbed WEPP that contains Tahoe-specific soils, for predicting runoff, erosion, phosphorus, and fine sediment.
WEPP Climate Parameter Files
- The Rock:Clime Interface for building weather input files for WEPP Windows using a detailed database of monthly rainfall distributions.
Peak Flow Calculator
- Peak Flow Calculator for combining output from ERMiT runs or from a runoff amount specified by the user with small watershed characteristics to estimate the peak flow.
Additional Tools
- WEPP Online GIS Watershed Interface (in development) for predicting watershed-level erosion on any PC with access to Google Maps.
- Water and Sediment Prediction program (WASP; in development) for aiding users in evaluating the impacts of forest management on water yield.