We present the developments on soil erosion modelling at European scale to respond to the policy needs. The Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission has developed the European Soil Erosion Modelling Platform (EUSEMP) to support the agro-environmental policies in the European Union (EU). The major component of EUSEMP is an hybrid soil erosion model named RUSLE2015 (RUSLE-based) to estimate soil loss by water erosion. The model runs with updated input layers (years: 2000, 2010 and 2016) and provides baselines for evaluating the current status of agricultural soils in the EU, evaluating the impact of agri-environmental policies on land management and making projections of soil loss by water erosion in 2050. In addition, EUSEMP includes also the Revised Wind Erosion Equation (RWEQ) to access wind erosion in EU arable lands and another component to access soil loss due to harvesting crops. Another component of EUSEMP is the sediment delivery model WaTEM/SEDEM to estimate net soil loss. Finally, the erosion models are coupled with the biogeochemical CENTURY model to estimate soil organic carbon losses by water erosion. EUSEMP targets to integrate the sediments transfer datasets with soil pollution data (e.g. mercury, copper) and nutrient losses (e.g. phoshorus).
DOI: 10.1007/978-981-16-7916-2_21
