Abstract:
The availability of information about soil erosion vulnerability is
necessary as a primary consideration to determine the effort of soil
conservation, particularly in the coal mining area. This study aimed to
estimate the potential risk of soil erosion from land cover variation in a
coal mining concession site in South Borneo. Data were taken from 18
stations of soil erosion monitoring which were evenly distributed in each
land cover. Soil erosion vulnerability was quantified using the Universal
Soil Loss Equation (USLE) method. The comparison mean of soil
erosion among land cover types was evaluated using the Kruskal-Wallis
test and followed by the Nemenyi test with a significant level of 5%.
Results found that the potential risk of soil erosion was significantly
different among land covers (p<0.05). The highest soil erosion
vulnerability was noted in the reclamation area of 1,012.3 t ha-1 year-1,
while the lowest risk of soil erosion was observed in plantation forests
of 47.9 t ha-1 year-1. Surprisingly, the potential risk of soil erosion in
natural forests was four times higher than in oil palm plantations.
Besides being located in hilly areas with high slope levels, the vegetation
density in natural forests was relatively low. However, our study
recorded there were two critical factors that highly correlated to soil
erosion vulnerability, i.e., soil erodibility (R = 0.89; p<0.05) and slope
length and steepness (R = 0.85; p<0.05).
