Journal of the Korean Geo-Environmental Society ISSN:1598-0820(Print) 2714-1233(Online) 한국지반환경공학회 논문집

The Mekong River plays an extremely important role in Southeast Asia. Flowing through six countries, including China, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos PDR, Cambodia, and Vietnam, it is a site of great biological and ecological diversity and the habitat of numerous species of fish. It also supports a very large population that lives along the river basin. Therefore, much attention has been focused on the giant Mekong River Basin, particularly, its soil erosion and sedimentation problems. In fact, many methods have been used to calculate and simulate these problems. However, in the case of the Mekong River Basin, the available data is limited because of the extreme size of the area (about 795,000 km2) and lack of equipment systems in the countries through which the Mekong River flows. In this study, we applied the Universal Soil Loss Equation (USLE) model in a GIS (Geographic Information System) framework to calculate the amount of soil erosion and sediment load during the selected period, from 1951 to 2007. The result points out dangerous areas, such as the Upper Mekong River Basin and 3S Basin (containing the Sekong, Sesan, and Srepok Rivers) that are suffering the serious consequences of soil erosion problems. Moreover, the present model is also useful for supporting river basin management in the implementation of sustainable management practices in the Mekong River Basin and other basins.