Abstract:The southern red soil region is densely populated, with strong development and utilization of land resources and diverse types of soil erosion. In order to research the eroded sediment sources in watershed with intensive exploitation under different land use types in red soil region, this study selected a small watershed in the town of Gande as researd object, and analyzed 41 geochemical properties of the potential sediment sources as well as sediment in the basin. Kruskal-Wallis H test and Stepwise discriminant analysis were used to identify the best combination of fingerprint factors and calculate the sediment contribution rates of each sediment source. The results showed that the best fingerprint combination was made up of eight factors, including A-P, Cu, P, Y, Ca, Ga, Sn, and Nd. The total cumulative contribution rate was over 90%, and the value of GOF was higher than 0.80. A multivariate mixed model was applied to identify the different sediment sources. It indicated that sediment mainly came from forest, tea plantations and mining area in the front rainy season, constituting 28.59%, 28.20%, and 27.59% respectively. The relative contribution rates of the four land use types were tea plantations > forest > mining area > farmland in the typhoon rainy season. The figures of sediment contribution percentages showed that the unit area sediment contribution rate in mining area was 8 times, 10 times and 10 times respectively of those in farmland, forest and tea plantation. That's to say, the soil erosion intensity in mining area is the highest.