Vegetation Drastically Reduces Wind Erosion: An Implementation of the RWEQ in the Mongolian Gobi Steppe
2022
Talukdar, Isita Nandana | Kowal, Virginia Anne | Huang, Binbin | Weil, Charlotte
Soil loss prevention is an important ecosystem service for protecting human and environmental health. Using spatiotemporal climate and environmental data of the Eastern Gobi Steppe, a region missing from previous studies of Mongolian wind-based soil erosion, we implemented the Revised Wind Erosion Equation (RWEQ) model to estimate soil loss. A replicable pipeline was developed to perform these computations, and made available openly. Soil loss was estimated on a monthly basis to analyze seasonal variations. The results show that the annual total soil loss was 61 × 10¹⁰ kg over an area of 69.3 × 10³ km², which is about 90 tonnes per hectare. Increasing fractional vegetation coverage to a uniform 50% coverage (doubling current vegetation coverage in every 1 km²) could reduce soil loss by 60%, highlighting the importance of protecting and increasing vegetation coverage in ecosystem service preservation.
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