Mapping the Spatiotemporal Evolution of Cropland-Related Soil Erosion in China over the Past Four Decades

China’s croplands are facing serious threats from soil erosion, calling for long-term and spatially explicit assessment to safeguard food security and promote sustainable land use management. Yet limited attention has been directed to examining high-resolution spatial cropland-related soil erosion in China over an extended time span, especially across diverse agricultural regions and different crop types. Therefore, this study applied high-resolution remote sensing datasets to investigate the spatially explicit dynamics of crop-specific soil erosion in China from 1980 to 2018 at a 30 m resolution based on the RUSLE model. Our results showed slight erosion has consistently been the major erosion type over the past 40 years, which was primarily observed in northern areas as compared to high cropland soil erosion intensity found in southern regions. Severe erosion occurring in the Loess Plateau area was found to have decreased since 1980 due to the implementation of ecological conservation practices. While soil erosion acreage remained stable in most agricultural zones, a notable decrease was observed in the Yangtze River and Huang-Huai-Hai Plain Regions, and increases were found in the Northern Arid and Semi-arid Region and the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau Region. In addition, grains showed the highest erosion rates, whereas fiber crops were revealed with the lowest erosion rates. By unveiling the temporal-spatial evolution patterns of China’s crop-specific soil erosion together with a 30 m resolution dataset produced across a 40-year time span, this study is fully supportive of promoting soil and water conservation in sloping croplands and safeguarding stable food supply and sustainable agricultural practices.