Multi-Decadal Monitoring of Soil Erosion Rates in South Europe

Abstract

Soil loss by water is a major form of land degradation with environmental and economic consequences. In particular, erosion rates are sensitive to both climate and land cover changes. The present study investigates the temporal changes in soil loss rate over South Europe during the 1980–2018 period. To that end, the Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation (RUSLE) was applied by integrating information from freely available geospatial datasets to conduct a multi-decadal assessment. In this frame, the temporal variability of the two dynamic RUSLE factors, namely rainfall erosivity (R) and cover management (C), was explored. Specifically, the rainfall erosivity values per decade were acquired from a newly developed dataset from the European Soil Data Center (ESDAC), coupling the Rainfall Erosivity Database at European Scale (REDES) and UERRA regional reanalysis rainfall data. On the other hand, land cover data were retrieved from the CORINE dataset (CLC) through the Copernicus Land Monitoring Service for different reference years. The appropriate values were assigned to each CLC category per country according to the recent literature to determine the C-factor. In terms of the other three static RUSLE factors, namely soil erodibility (K), slope length and steepness (LS) and support practice (P), these were obtained from the ESDAC database by exploiting the results of previous pan-European assessments. The results indicate that the mean annual soil erosion rates in South Europe were 6.82, 4.90, 4.89 and 5.26 t/ha/year for the decades 1981–1990, 1991–2000, 2001–2010 and 2011–2018, respectively.

Keywords

• erosion
• RUSLE
• UERRA reanalysis
• CORINE
• South Europe