Quantitative assessment of vegetation cover and soil degradation factors within terrain units for planning, monitoring and assessment of renaturation along oil and gas pipelines

This paper evaluates the renaturation activities applying the quantification of vegetation cover (VC), the site suitability analysis (SSA) based on the predefined criteria (slope steepness category (SSC), soil erodibility factor (K) and VC) and soil erosion model (SEM) results within the terrain units (TUs) along pipeline rights-of-way (RoW). Quantification of VC percentage is performed to assess the overall restored VC from 2005 to 2007. The results of the quantitative analysis in 2007 show that the total area of restored VC is 10.7 km2, and 8.9 km2 still needs to be restored to comply with the environmental acceptance criteria. As a result of SSA, TUs were prioritized by erosion vulnerability and this allowed to better understand the landscape behaviour in regards to erosion processes. SEM provided more detailed predictions of erosion classes falling into TUs. SEM identified 40% of erosion sites occurred from 2005 to 2010.