Seasonal monitoring of soil erosion at regional scale: An application of the G2 service in Crete focusing on the agricultural land uses

A new soil erosion model, namely G2, model, was applied in the island of Crete focusing on the agricultural land uses, including potential grazing lands. The G2 model was developed by the Geoland2 project as an agro-environmental service in the framework of Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES) initiative. G2 takes advantage of the empirical background of the Universal Soil Loss Equation (USLE) and the Gavrilovic model, together with readily available time series of vegetation layers and 10-minute rainfall intensity data to produce month-step erosion risk maps at 300m scale. The development of a of land use influence parameters based on empirical data and the introduction of a corrective term in the estimation of the topographic influence factor are the among the innovations of the G2 model. The mean annual erosion rate in Crete was found to be 8.123 t ha-1. The season from October to January, identical to the rainy season in Crete, was found to be the most critical accounting for 80% of the annual erosion in the island. Capturing seasonal erosion figures proved to be crucial for erosion hot-spot allocation and identification of risky land uses. In Crete, annual high erosion was detected in natural grasslands and shrublands (14.023 t ha-1) , mainly due to the intensification of livestock grazing during the last decades. The G2 service application allows an integrated spatio-temporal monitoring of soil erosion per land use based on moderate data input requirements and existing datasets.

PANAGOS Panagiotis;  KARYDAS Christos G.;  BALLABIO Cristiano;  GITAS Ioannis Z.; 

2013-11-18

ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV

JRC81553

0303-2434,   

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0303243413001116,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC81553,   

10.1016/j.jag.2013.09.012,