Soil erosion of Hungary assessed by spatially explicit modelling

Abstract

The conservation of soil resources is increasingly becoming a critical issue worldwide, with growing interest in carbon stocks and water storage within the soil. Hungary is no exception, and there has been a demand for a country level soil erosion map that incorporates digital information available from the latest surveys and digital mapping campaigns. The map presented in this paper in based on the extremely wet year of 2010, and thus provides users a 1:100,000 scale 'worst case scenario' of soil erosion risk in Hungary (see Main Map). Results from both the Universal Soil Loss Equation and the Pan-European Soil Erosion Risk Assessment models were combined in order to achieve a map that can be used by a wide range of professionals. Both models estimate soil erosion by water in tonnes per hectare per year. ARTICLE HISTORY

Evaluating the new soil erosion map of Hungary—A semiquantitative approach

“…Soil erosion map of Hungary (after Pásztor et al, ) [Colour figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]…”

“…The TDR database itself contains data based on agricultural years, for 2008/2009, 2009/2010, and 2010/2011. Whereas the latter two were overlapping with the benchmark year of 2010 used by Pásztor et al (), data for 2008/2009 were also included to assess if the predicted risks were transferable to other years. Data for merely 3 years provide only limited information in terms of long‐term erosion rates.…”

“…Spatial mean of erosion estimates from the erosion risk map by Pásztor et al () have been extracted for validation sites via QGIS software (QGIS Development Team, ). Although this method does not consider spatial variability of predicted erosion rates within individual farms, the validation data do not allow for more detailed spatial analysis of the predicted results.…”

“…This study aims to provide semiquantitative validation of the results of Pásztor et al (2016), by using available field-and plot-level monitoring data.…”

Spatial analysis of changes and anomalies of intense rainfalls in Hungary

“…However, in the Nyírség, the ratio of forest land cover is high (Négyesi, G. et al 2015;Négyesi, G. 2018) and the soil texture is sandy (Pásztor, L. et al 2016a,b), the probability of pluvial flood occurrence remains still low. As in this region the most dangerous soil degrading factor is wind erosion, an increasing soil moisture content in early summer could provide defense against deflation (Négyesi, G. et al 2016;Pásztor, L. et al 2016c). In contrast, at the vicinity of Szeged the highest increase, parallel with the highest precipitation volumes, triggers increasing pluvial flood risk as a result of loamy soil texture and of the highly degraded structure of the soils due to intensive agricultural cultivation (Van Leeuwen, B. et al 2013).…”