Application of GIS to evaluate long-term variation of sediment discharge to coastal environment

This paper presents a GIS-based method to calculate the total sediment discharge from river basins to coastal areas. This method uses Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation (RUSLE) to calculate the rate of soil erosion and Gross Erosion-Sediment Delivery method (GESD) to calculate the total sediment discharge in a GIS modeling environment. The model is tested using the data of Abe River then applied to four river basins in Asia. Global data sets are used as the input to the current model. The result shows that there are significant variations of sediment discharges due to the precipitation change in these river basins.