SERENA EJP SOIL: Erosion control map of Hungary

The internal EJP SOIL project SERENA contributed to the evaluation of soil multifunctionality aiming at providing assessment tools for land planning and soil policies at different scales. By co-working with relevant stakeholders, the project provided co-developed indicators and associated cookbooks to assess and map them, to report both on soil degradation, soil-based ecosystem services and their bundles, under actual conditions and for climate and land-use changes, at the regional, national, and European scales.

Present data was prepared according to the methodology of SERENA Soil erosion and soil erosion control cookbook for the territory of Hungary. The map of soil loss by water erosion (soil threat) was based on the RUSLE model. To create the soil loss map we used data on yearly precipitation of CARPATCLIM database, and AGRI4CAST MARS (R-factor); sand-, silt-, and clay content of DOSoReMI.hu database, and SOC map compiled in the framework of SERENA (K-factor); ESDAC LS-factor for the EU; ESDAC Cover Management factor for the EU (C-factor); ESDAC Support Practices factor for the EU (P-factor). For the soil erosion control, the difference between the erosion map without vegetation (C-factor = 1) and the erosion map with vegetation was calculated. The erosion maps with-, and without vegetation were categorized according to the cookbook, and the result map shows how many categories the pixel has changed when vegetation is taken into account (0: the pixel is in the same category in both maps, 1: minor role of vegetation, 2: moderate role of vegetation, 3: significant role of vegetation).