Soil erosion represents a natural hazard not only because of on-site soil loss. The eroded sediment is transported into neighboring environments and causes serious impacts as muddy floods, reservoir siltation, eutrophication and pollution of water bodies. These off-site damages can be very costly, affect a lot of people and contaminate water-resources. Therefore, there is a strong public interest in understanding the processes of sediment mobilization and delivery processes on predicting the frequency, magnitude and extent of off-site impacts of water erosion.
Monitoring and modelling on-site effects has to be coupled with measurements, observation and documentation of off-site impacts to predict and control the processes successfully.
Since soil erosion is strongly related to land use and land management land use changes are of particular importance in accelerating or decelerating erosion processes. These problems are exasperated by expected changes of rainfall patterns due to climate change and the requirements on new legislation, such as the EU Water Framework Directive, providing new challenges for planning authorities in order to cope with off-site damage.
In particular we welcome papers that offer insights into:
- Understanding the interactions between land use and off-site damages (positive and negative)
- Mitigation measures to prevent off-site damages
- Measurements, observation and documentation of off-site damages
- New model approaches, model couplings, GIS-based documentations and risk assessments
- Selective particle transport modelling
- Predicting particle attached pollutant transports


Invited Speaker: Prof. Dr. Nikolaus Kuhn (Basel):
"The Great Karoo region of South Africa: a landscape formed by soil erosion?"