Effects of vegetation cover and precipitation on the process of sediment produced by erosion in a small watershed of loess region

With growing concerns over changes of the living environment and ecological environment, more and more scholars have focused their researches on understanding how vegetation covers and atmospheric conditions respond to soil erosion in watersheds. Former studies show that both the natural factors such as precipitation, vegetation, slope of terrain, soil properties and human activities are the main factors to affect the amount of sediment produced by erosion in the watershed, and there are special conditions of climate and soil that are unique to loess areas for water and soil conservations. Thus the relationships between soil erosion and vegetation and precipitation are very complicated and interesting. As a loess area, the Lüergou watershed with the area of 12.1 km2 lies in west of China. The watershed was a key area of high water and soil erosion forty years ago, but the area of vegetation cover has become larger because of highly effective methods of water and soil conservation. In the factors affecting the amount of sediment produced by erosion in the study area, which is more important for soil erosion: vegetation cover or precipitation? The experts, community has discussed this question for a long time. And the Lüergou watershed has become the natural and ideal test watershed. Based on water observation data, climate data and NOAA/AVHRR NDVI images collected from 1982 to 2000 in the Lüergou watershed of loess areas, analyses of the correlation and multi-variable regression were used to discuss the relationships among the amount of sediment produced by erosion, water indexes, precipitation factors and vegetation cover. The conclusions showed that with the increase of precipitation indexes and the decrease of plant indexes, and the amount of sediment produced by erosion in the study area would become larger. In order to distinguish the influences of erosion due to human activity and natural factors, the paper introduced multi-variable regression method by standardization data to determine the relative contributing ratio to soil erosions in the study area. The conclusions showed that the contributing ratio of vegetation cover and precipitation changes were 45.7% and 54.3%. It was obvious that the influences of precipitation were larger than those of vegetation for the soil erosion in the study area.