Regional Soil Erosion Mapping in Pre-GIS Era: Achievements and implications
- 1Northwest University, College of Urban and Environmental Science, Department of Remote Sensing and Geoinformation Science, xi'an, China
- 2Chinese Academy of Sciences and Ministry of Water Resources, Institute of Soil and Water Conservation, Yangling, Shaanxi, China
Before the wide application of remote sensing and GIS, ie the pre-GIS era, researchers carried out a series of regional (national to global scale) erosion mapping and research, and group of analog map of soil erosion maps. This manuscript summarizes the achievements and shortcomings of these analog maps, and then discuss the implications of them on today's digital soil erosion mapping.
From the perspective of geographic information science and digital soil erosion mapping, the main achievements of early soil erosion mapping are summarized in three aspects, including: (1) created the ontology of large regional (national to global) soil erosion research, base on witch, soil erosion can be analysed and control plan can be made. (2) innovatively established the benchmarks and initiation of large regional soil erosion mapping and monitoring; (3) developed a paradigm for for making analog regional soil erosion map. However, the early soil erosion mapping was basically qualitative, static and macro, focusing only on soil and agriculture purpose.
The analog soil erosion map has many implications for the current digital soil erosion mapping, including: (1) It always takes the spatial representation of soil erosion as mission for mappers, but cannot be done as a case of application of remote sensing and other technical methods in soil erosion researches. (2) considering the interaction of various erosion processes such as water erosion, wind erosion, and gully erosion, to represent the comprehensive spatial pattern of various types of soil erosion, and to improve the status quo that the quantitative evaluation of erosion rate is only conducted for a certain erosion type. (3) systematically explore and collect legacy data of soil erosion maps, then establish a free available databased of regional soil erosion maps. (4) considering soil erosion as the driving force of the biogeochemical cycling of essential elements (C, N, P, etc) in earth system, overcome the shortcomings of analog erosion mapping, make a try to develop a new paradigm for digital soil erosion mapping.
How to cite: Yang, Q., Li, R., Wang, L., Pang, G., Wang, C., Long, Y., and Yuan, X.: Regional Soil Erosion Mapping in Pre-GIS Era: Achievements and implications, EGU General Assembly 2023, Vienna, Austria, 24–28 Apr 2023, EGU23-3153, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu23-3153, 2023.
