Advances in the study of soil erosion by water in Mexico published in Spanish

Abstract

Research on soil erosion by water (SEW) includes studies on different spatial and temporal scales. Nevertheless, in Mexico (as in many countries of the Latin American and the Caribbean Region), a lack of studies on SEW is constantly reported in high‐impact journals. We argue that this lack is mainly due to the language in which the majority of the scientific research about SEW in Mexico is published, which is Spanish. Therefore, the objective is to identify the main trends in SEW research in Mexico, through a review of peer‐reviewed studies published in Spanish. The review is centred on two sources of studies published in Spanish that are relevant to Mexican soil sciences communities: Scielo (Scientific Electronic Library Online) and Redalyc (Diamond Open Access scientific journal network non‐commercial global infrastructure owned by academia). As a result, we identified 37 relevant peer‐reviewed articles about SEW, and the principal article aim of these works is modelling and measuring SEW (45.9 and 29.7% of the total articles compiled, respectively). We observed that research on SEW in Mexico follows the same trends as global reports. For example, the most frequently implemented models are those in the Universal Soil Loss Equation and its variants. We observed no data‐sharing culture in most of the revised articles. Our results suggest that large‐scale studies on SEW are needed in Mexico to better understand its role in large‐scale earth system models. Therefore, we conclude that despite the scarce international visibility of Spanish‐written SEW research, multiple valuable studies have indeed been carried out and they provide relevant information for the development of baseline references towards enabling nationwide soil erosion monitoring programmes in Mexico.