Catchment-Scale Soil Erosion Response to Long-Term Land Use Change in the Myjava Basin, Slovakia

Soil erosion continues to pose a major global challenge, yet long-term catchment-scale analyses that explicitly connect historical land-use change with erosion responses remain scarce. This study examines the influence of approximately +240 years of historical and projected land-use change on soil erosion in the Myjava Basin by incorporating parcel-level land-use reconstructions spanning 1787–2030 into a distributed USLE-2D modelling framework. The R, K, and parcel-based C and P factors were temporally harmonized, while the LS factor was derived using an ensemble of four widely used algorithms. Principal component analysis was employed to assess the relative contribution of RUSLE factors through time, and all analyses were conducted within a reproducible geospatial modelling workflow. The results reveal a long-term reduction in total soil erosion of approximately 78% at the landscape scale and 60% within arable land from the nineteenth century to the present, primarily driven by a substantial decrease in arable land cover from 62% to 37% and the expansion of forest and shrub vegetation. Despite this overall decline, persistent erosion hotspots remain concentrated on steep upland slopes with high LS values (>10%), while agricultural parcels consistently exhibit erosion rates 10–20 times higher than the basin-wide mean across all periods. The PCA indicates that LS and rainfall erosivity are the dominant controls on erosion variability, with principal component loadings ranging from 0.78 to 0.84, whereas the influence of C and P factors increases in recent and projected periods, accounting for up to 40% of the total explained variance. Overall, these results demonstrate that long-term land-use transitions have markedly reduced basin-scale soil erosion risk. 

 

Acknowledgments: This work was supported by the Slovak Research and Development Agency under contract no. APVV 23-0332, VV-MVP-24-0208 and VEGA Grant Agency no. 1/0657/25. The authors are grateful for the support.