Modelling soil erosion focusing on event-size occurrences under global change in a vineyard catchment

Soil erosion is a balance between forces acting to detach and transport sediment and those resisting, such as soil cohesion or protection of vegetation cover. The amount of eroded particles is proportional to the acting forces, but the feedback, as is widely acknowledged, has a non-linear behaviour. Moreover, most of the erosion is concentrated in the strongest events, as evidenced by many authors.
Here, in a long-term simulation, we investigate the occurrence of the size of the erosion events in a vineyard catchment area. We analysed around 700 rainfall events over 20 years  from two climate series (historical 1985-2005, and and future 2040-2060), and four contrasted land use and management scenarios.
The results confirmed that the erosion is driven by a limited number of strong events with an increment in future series due to an increase in frequency of the more severe rainfall events. We observed that: 1) Size of erosion events VS return time exhibit different logarithmic trends in each LU scenario; 2) Long-term erosion series show that the few major erosion phases are due to a limited number of events, the most severe; 3) The concentration of erosion events towards the highest values is more pronounced in intensified landscape indicating more reactive erosion than in protected landscapes.
This suggests that controlling the state of intensification of a landscape (i.e. intensified or preserved) can mitigate soil erosion even if climate change tends to increase erosion rates.