REVISED UNIVERSAL SOIL LOSS EQUATION


	The range where soil erosion prediction technology needs to be accurate is from about 1 tons/acre to about 15 tons/acre for conservation planning for protecting the soil against excessive erosion.
	Anything less than 1 tons/acre is already below almost all soil loss tolerance values and thus erosion is problem.
	Anything greater than about 15 tons/acre (three times soil loss tolerance) is going to be recognized as being serious erosion problem regardless of the whether the estimate is 15, 25, or 40 tons/acre.
	The critical concern is does the technology accurately distinguish in recommending to a farmer that the proposed management practice will take soil loss from 10 tons/acre to 5 tons/acre.
	Accuracy for high soil loss estimates is important when sedimentation is important, such as the amount of sediment that will be trapped in sediment control basins, the amount of sediment that will be collected in roadside ditches, and the amount of sediment delivered to a stream.
	Accuracy of low soil loss estimates and sediment characteristics are important in water quality analysis.

	When all is said and done, no other erosion prediction has been demonstrated to perform better than RUSLE2 for day in and day out conservation planning at the field office level.

	Certain technologies are far more powerful than RUSLE2 for evaluating the performance of sediment control basin and erosion control structures used on severely disturbed land.

	Also, RUSLE2 does not apply to complex watershed for computing sediment delivery.

	However, when properly used, RUSLE2 is a proper (and best) tool for estimating interrill and rill erosion on large complex areas like in the USDA NRI.