Hannes Isaak Reuter

Modeling Wind Erosion Events – Bridging the Gap Between Digital Soil Mapping and Digital Soil Risk Assessment

Wind erosion submits fine as well as coarse soil particles into the atmosphere, thereby affecting physical and chemical processes, affecting radiative forcing, chemical reactions and biological systems. This study was conducted to quantify wind erosion events by generating data for soil erodibility and wind erosivity for the Danube Basin. Estimates of surface soil texture were generated from ∼8,000 soil profiles and 54 auxiliary datasets using the regression-kriging method. The quality of the regression equation was not satisfactory. Validation showed an RMSE of 8.6, 10.4 and 13.5 for clay, sand, and silt. Different texture scenarios were generated and the number of wind erosion events for the year 2006 was modeled using weather data from the European Centre for Medium range weather forecast. Vegetation cover fraction was approximated from Meteosat data. Magnitude and spatial extent of wind erosion estimations showed similar order compared to wind erosion estimations based on the European Soil Database.

Development of global soil information facilities

ISRIC - World Soil Information has a mandate to serve the international community as custodian of global soil information and to increase awareness and understanding of the role of soils in major global issues. To adapt to the current demand for soil information, ISRIC is updating its enterprise data management system, including procedures for registering acquired data, such as lineage, versioning, quality assessment, and control. Data can be submitted, queried, and analysed using a growing range of web-based services - ultimately aiming at full and open exchange of data, metadata, and products - through the ICSU-accredited World Data Centre for Soils.