Excerpt
Soil erosion is one of the greatest environmental issues affecting both agricultural and natural lands all over the world (Pimentel et al. 1995). Accordingly, modeling soil erosion is of paramount importance to understanding the processes governing soil degradation and resulting losses (De Vente and Poesen 2005), predicting runoff and soil erosion rates (Foster 1991; Laflen et al. 1991; Boardman 2006), identifying or choosing appropriate measures for erosion control and making decisions and planning in relation to public policy (Renschler and Harbor 2002), as well as coping with projected changes in erosion due to climate change and/or land use (Williams et al. 1996; Lee et al. 1999; Flanagan et al. 2007). As a result, improving the predictive capabilities for soil erosion under global change, by testing and validating several soil erosion models at the field and catchment scale through the Soil Erosion Network (Ingram et al. 1996), has become one of the core tasks in the Global Change and Terrestrial Ecosystem Core Project (GCTE) of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Program (IGBP) (De Roo and Jetten 1999; Jetten et al. 1999).
However, until only recently, soil erosion modeling efforts, together with an understanding of the related soil erosion processes, have been mostly confined…
- © 2013 by the Soil and Water Conservation Society
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