A Geoinformatics Approach to Water Erosion: Soil Loss and Beyond

Water erosion is a major environmental threat that has long-lasting destructive consequences, valued at tens of billions of dollars per annum. This book demonstrates how cutting-edge geoinformatics, data science methodologies, and soil health indicators can be used to measure, predict, and regulate these hazards. It shows how these approaches can quantify the effect of water erosion on the soil layer, soil minerals, and soil loss, as well as the wide-range of services that agricultural ecosystems can supply for the benefit and well-being of humans.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 349 pages
Publication date: 19 February 2023
Publisher: Springer Nature Switzerland AG

Water erosion is a significant environmental concern on a global scale, causing extensive damage with annual costs estimated to be in the tens of billions of dollars. The erosion of soils leads to decreased crop yields and compromised agroecosystem functionality, resulting in reduced water holding capacity, poor aeration, limited microbial activity, and loose soil structure. This, in turn, affects carbon sequestration, nutrient cycling, water body contamination through eutrophication, limited flood protection, and poor attention restoration.

This book showcases the utilization of cutting-edge geoinformatics, data science methodologies, and soil health indicators to measure, predict, and regulate these significant environmental hazards. By employing these approaches, the impact of water erosion on various aspects of agricultural ecosystems, including the soil layer, soil minerals, soil loss, and the range of services they provide for human well-being, can be quantified in both time and space.

The algorithms described in this book are instrumental in facilitating this paradigm shift. They encompass tasks such as extracting photogrammetric DEMs from drone data, advanced drainage structure calculations, fuzzy process-based modeling, spatial topographic threshold computations, multicriteria analyses, expert-based systems development using analytic hierarchal processes, innovative data-mining and machine learning tools, autocorrelation and interpolation of soil health, physically-based soil evolution models, spatial decision support systems, and numerous other methodologies.

By leveraging these advanced techniques, the book provides valuable insights into the measurement, prediction, and regulation of water erosion, contributing to the preservation of agricultural catchments and the promotion of sustainable agricultural practices.

Weight: 706g
Dimension: 254 x 178 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9783030915384
Edition number: 1st ed. 2022