Land degradation in semiarid agricultural catchments: Risks, soil health and ecosystem services

Abstract:

Land degradation due to soil erosion is a long-lived and an ongoing problem that costs to humanity tens of billions of USD every year. Semiarid catchments are especially sensitive to the impact of water erosion processes and it is therefore crucial to quantify expected changes in soil properties and their spatial patterns within the catchment as a response to the intensified soil erosion processes. Geoinformatics can be used to monitor agroecosystems, to identify areas under risk, to map soil health and to feed Spatial Decision Support Systems that can be applied to suggest answers to delay, and perhaps halt, the destructive processes. In this work we introduce a combined quantitative framework, based on soil evolution modeling, geostatistics, experts knowledge and machine learning techniques, to address efficient soil conservation, drainage engineering, agricultural tillage and cropping systems aimed at increasing resilience of agroecosystems to gradual elevation in landuse and climatic stress.