G. Mendicino & P. Versace (Dipartimento di Difesa del Suolo, Universita` della Calabria, C.da S. Antonello, 87040 Montalto Uffugo (CS), Italy)

Land degradation by water erosion represents one of the major issues in the field of the environmental planning. soil erosion and sediment transport are spatially distributed processes, and their evaluation can be easily realized by means of the use of geographic information systems. The greater availability of digital and geo-lithological data managed and stored inside gis has implied the development of techniques and procedures aimed to the definition of the spatial prediction of erosion and deposition rates across a catchment. In this paper, by means of the data directly measured on an experimental basin in southern italy, an analysis on different gis-based methodologies has been done with the aim of determining the spatial erosion risk assessment of the examined basin. Finally, the performances of the adopted procedures have been evaluated comparing these results with those directly obtained on the experimental basin.