Soil loss due to crop harvesting in the European Union

Soil loss due to crop harvesting in the European Union. The regional estimates of total Soil Loss by Crop Harvesting (SLCH) are presented at country and regional level.
Soil loss due to crop harvesting in the European Union
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Publisher: 
Joint Research Centre of the European Commission
Year: 
2019
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Considerable amounts of soil can be removed fromthe field due to soil sticking to the harvested roots. Soil Loss due to Crop Harvesting (SLCH) is defined as the loss (or export) of top soil from arable land during harvesting of crops such as potato, sugar beet, carrot or chicory roots. We performed a research study  to scale up the findings of past studies, carried out at plot, regional, and national level, in order to obtain some preliminary insights into the magnitude of soil loss from cropland due to sugar beets  and potatoes harvesting in Europe. We address this issue at European Union (EU) scale taking into account longterm (1975–2016) crop statistics of sugar beet and potato aggregated at regional and country levels.

Four Shape files are available for download (corresponding to the 4 figures of the publication):

  • Impact of soil texture, expressed by the textural index on Soil Loss by Crop Harvesting SLCH
  • Aggregated data (at country level) on Soil Loss by Crop Harvesting (SLCH) for sugar beet and potato
  • Soil Loss (1000 tons) by CropHarvesting (SLCH) crops at regional level (NUTS2) and contribution of crop harvesting (sugar beet and potato) to area-specific soil loss (t ha−1) from all arable lands.
  • Decrease (%) of Soil Loss due to Crop Harvesting (SLCH) during the 3 study periods (1975–1986, 1987–1999 and 2000–2016).

Spatial Coverage: 28 Member States of European Union
Resolution: NUTS2
Time Reference: 3 periods 2000-2016, 1987-99, 1975-86
Format: Shape files and excel files
Projection: Lambert_Azimuthal_Equal_Area
Input data: Statistical data for crop harvesting in the European Union (Origin: Eurostat)
More Information: Soil loss due to crop harvesting in the European Union
Release Date: 13/02/2019

The methodology and the results of this study are explained in the recent published paper.

Update 2022:The approach of SLCH has been applied in a spatially explicit pixel-based fashion, overcoming the origial limitation related to the regional aggregation to the EU NUTS2 level. To do so, we used the pan-European crop-type map (reference year 2018) developed in JRC (D; Andrimont et al., 2021) which provides gridded information about potato and sugar beet locations. Therefore, we make available a pixel-based soil loss by harvesting crops dataset.

Soil loss due to crop harvesting in the European Union

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