FlowDist2Veg: An ArcGIS toolbox for rapid assessment of soil erosion potential on hillslopes

This work presents an ArcGIS toolbox for calculating and visualizing the effects of vegetation patches as sinks of surface runoff to reduce the soil erosion potential on hillslopes. The toolbox essentially calculates the flow distance from any location on a hillslope till obstructed by vegetation patches. As for innovative contributions, the toolbox enables water erosion assessments that 1) consider connectivity of surface flow, 2) are specific to location within a hillslope, and 3) allow rapid, multi-scenario analyses at high resolution over large spatial extents. The FlowDist2Veg toolbox takes advantage of the terrain flow analysis functions in the existing Hydrology toolbox and accepts input layers of any coordinate system and any resolution. The toolbox is written in python 3 and imports only the arcpy package. As an example, an analysis was done in Santa Rita Experimental Range to demonstrate the functionality of the toolbox.