Water soil erosion under climate and land use change: current status and forecast

Under the conditions of a changing climate, slope runoff from arable lands undergoes varying degrees of significant changes in different parts of the temperate climate zone. The article, based on a review of published data and the author’s generalizations, examines the main trends in the transformation of soil erosion in the largest agricultural regions of the world with an emphasis on the European Territory of Russia (ETR). For ETR, based on observations of slope runoff during snowmelt, a clear trend of its reduction was revealed, starting from the 1990 s up until the complete cessation of the forest-steppe zone in the west and its replacement by mixed snowmelt/rainfall erosion in the west of the steppe zone. A general reduction in the rate of soil losses within the southern megaslope of ETR was revealed for all landscape zones except for the south of the steppe zone based on estimates of the rate of sediment deposition in the bottoms of the dry valleys of first-order catchments. It is shown that climate warming contributes to an increase in the frequency of extreme rainfall events, which is especially significant in Western and Central Europe. This trend is still less evident within the ETR. Structural changes in land use have affected Russian agriculture to the greatest extent in recent decades. Here, up until the beginning of the 21 st century, there was a significant reduction in arable land, which since the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century has been replaced by the restoration of arable land areas in the forest-steppe and steppe zones. In North and especially in South America, over the past two decades, zero tillage has been used on significant areas of previously arable land, which has significantly reduced the rate of soil erosion. At the same time, in a number of regions of the forest-steppe zone located within the East European Plain, since 2014, the share of row crops has increased sharply (up to 30 % of the total area of cultivated land), which has increased the likelihood of severe erosion.