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| Titel |
Advances in wind erosion modelling in Europe |
| VerfasserIn |
Pasquale Borrelli, Emanuele Lugato, Christine Alewell, Luca Montanarella, Panos Panagos |
| Konferenz |
EGU General Assembly 2017
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| Medientyp |
Artikel
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| Sprache |
en
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| Digitales Dokument |
PDF |
| Erschienen |
In: GRA - Volume 19 (2017) |
| Datensatznummer |
250147814
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| Publikation (Nr.) |
 EGU/EGU2017-12027.pdf |
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| Zusammenfassung |
| Soil erosion by wind is a serious environmental problem often resulting in severe forms of soil degradation. Wind erosion is also a phenomenon relevant for Europe, although this land degradation process has been overlooked until very recently. The state-of-the-art literature presents wind erosion as a process that locally affects the semi-arid areas of the Mediterranean region as well as the temperate climate areas of the northern European countries. Actual observations, field measurements and modelling assessments, however, are all extremely limited and highly unequally distributed across Europe. As a result, we currently lack comprehensive understanding about where and when wind erosion occurs in Europe, and the intensity of erosion that poses a threat to agricultural productivity.
Today's challenge is to integrate the insights of local experiments and field-scale models into a new generation of large-scale wind erosion models. While naturally being less accurate than field-scale models, these large-scale modelling approaches still provide essential knowledge about where and when wind erosion occurs and can disclose the level of risk for agricultural productivity in specific areas.
Here, we present a geographic information system (GIS) version of the RWEQ (named GIS-RWEQ) to quantitatively assess soil loss by wind over large study areas (Land Degradation & Development, DOI: 10.1002/ldr.2588). The model designed to predict the daily soil loss potential at a ca. 1 km2 spatial resolution shows high consistency with local measurements reported in literature. The average soil loss predicted by GIS-RWEQ for the European arable land totals ~62 million Mg yr-1, with an average area-specific soil loss of 0.53 Mg yr-1. The JRC model RUSLE2015, for the same area estimates ~295 million Mg yr-1 of soil loss due to water erosion. Notably, soil loss by wind erosion in the European arable land could be as high as ~20% of water erosion, even though the areas affected are mainly concentrated in hotspots. |
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