Using CSLE to find the dominant factor in the change of soil erosion in the past 50 years on the Chinese Loess Plateau

Once one of the most severe soil loss regions worldwide, the Chinese Loess Plateau has experienced large-scale land use changes and vegetation restoration in the past few decades. Understanding how land use change affects soil erosion is critical in the region's ecological construction and land management. In this study, the Beiluo River Basin covering 26,905 km² in the hinterland of the Loess Plateau was selected to investigate vegetation restoration and its impacts on soil loss rates over the last 50 years. Results show that land use in the basin has changed considerably, mainly reflected in the upper reaches. From 1970–2020, cropland in the upper reaches decreased by 54%, directly leading to a 9.1-fold increase in forested land. Landsat-NDVI shows vegetation coverage increased from 21.1% to 69.9% over time. Vegetation coverage changed from 48.1% to 78.7% for the entire basin. The Chinese Soil Loss Equation (CSLE) was used and confirmed to be satisfactory with a high coefficient of determination (R², 0.89) and a strong Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency coefficient (0.72), although an underestimation exists. With the change in land use, the specific soil loss simulated in the upper reaches maintained a high rate of around 8,000 t·km⁻²·yr⁻¹ from the 1970s to the 1990s, dramatically dropping to 3,058 t·km⁻²·yr⁻¹ in the 2000s, then attenuated to 1,321 t·km⁻²·yr⁻¹ in the 2020s. For the entire basin, soil loss rates dropped from 4,090 to 1,848 and 890 t·km⁻²·yr⁻¹ from the 1970s to the 2000s and 2020s, respectively. Attribution analysis showed that the dominant factor in the change in soil loss rates in the 1980s and 1990s relative to the 1970s was the change in rainfall erosivity for the entire watershed. However, with vegetation coverage increasing to 59.0% in the 2000s, vegetation restoration rapidly converted to the dominant factor contributing 78.3% to soil loss decrease in that period. With expanding vegetation cover, its contribution grew to 84.9% in the 2020s. The shift is evident in each reach of the basin except the terrain-plain area with the majority of farmland. The findings are helpful for sustainable land use planning and socio-economic development on the Loess Plateau and in similar areas.