The Application of the Erosion Potential Method to Alpine Areas: Methodological Improvements and Test Case

The assessment of soil erosion intensity is of primary importance for land use planning, soil conservation, pollution control and water resources management. For these reasons many researches were prompted in order to develop instruments for the estimate of the sediment budget. The hydraulic approach deals with the problem on the basis of the transport capacity of the river in each cross section, disregarding the availability of sediments at the basin scale. On the contrary, conceptualized models evaluate the intensity of erosion processes at the basin or the parcel scale with different time horizons.
The Erosion Potential Method (Gavrilovic 1988), in the following also indicated as “EPM”, is an empirical semi distributed model to estimate the mean annual volume of soil erosion and sediment yield at the basin scale. It combines in a simple structure all the most statistically significant parameters controlling soil particles detachment and transport. Although calibrated for the Dinaric Alps, several applications to the Italian and Swiss Alps can be find in the literature.