Pan-European monitoring of gully erosion: spatial patterns, land-use controls and implications for soil security

Gully erosion is one of the most severe yet least systematically monitored forms of soil erosion in Europe, causing disproportionate losses of fertile soil, landscape fragmentation and significant off-site impacts. Despite its importance for agricultural sustainability and long-term soil security, gully erosion has historically been poorly represented in continental-scale monitoring frameworks, limiting its integration into policy-relevant assessments.

Here we present a pan-European analysis of gully erosion based on the 2022 Land Use/Cover Area frame Survey (LUCAS), which combined in situ field observations and on-screen interpretation across 399,591 locations in the European Union. This effort resulted in GE-LUCAS v1.1, the first harmonized EU-wide inventory of gully erosion channels, identifying 3,116 locations affected by gully erosion, corresponding to approximately 0.8% of all surveyed points. The inventory reveals strong spatial contrasts across Europe, with a clear predominance of gully occurrence in Mediterranean regions and substantially lower frequencies in northern and Atlantic areas. Gully presence shows consistent associations with land use and land cover, soil texture classes and biogeographical regions, underscoring the combined influence of climate conditions, topography and land management practices on gully development (Borrelli et al., 2025a).

In the second part of the contribution, we use Mediterranean olive groves as an illustrative example to demonstrate how these continental-scale patterns translate into acute threats to soil security at the landscape level. Recent evidence highlights that the expansion of olive cultivation onto steeper, erosion-prone terrain, combined with intensive management practices and increasing climate pressure, has led to widespread gully erosion and extremely high soil loss rates in key producing regions such as southern Spain, Italy and Greece. In these systems, gully erosion undermines the long-term availability of soil as a productive resource, amplifies off-site environmental impacts and increases socio-economic vulnerability in rural areas (Borrelli et al., 2025b).

Overall, this contribution demonstrates the value of harmonized large-scale monitoring for identifying gully erosion hotspots and land-use systems at risk, providing new evidence to support soil security objectives and targeted mitigation strategies under current and emerging EU soil policies.

 

Acknowledgement

Authors acknowledge funding from the European Union Horizon Europe Project Soil O-LIVE (Grant No. 101091255) and from the European Union’s NextGenerationEU project ‘Complex Modelling of Multiple Land Degradation Processes in Europe’ (EUroLanD), grant agreement ID 760051/23.05.2023, code CF 216/29.11.2022, under the National Recovery and Resilience Plan of Romania – Pillar III, Component C9-2022-I8.

References

Borrelli, P., Matthews, F., Alewell, C., Kaffas, K., Poesen, J., Saggau, P., & Panagos, P. (2025a). A hybrid in situ and on-screen survey to monitor gully erosion across the European Union. Scientific Data, 12(1), 755.

Borrelli, P., Matthews, F., Saggau, P., Manzaneda, A. J., Panagos, P., Kaffas, K., & Alewell, C. (2025b). Unsustainably losing ground. Nature Sustainability, 8(9), 986-989.