Soil erosion risk, Sicilian Region (1:250,000)

Assessing the risk of soil erosion caused by water at the regional level is important for current and future planning of land use and environmental actions to combat land degradation. The gravity of the risk depends not only on the rate of soil erosion by water, but also on other factors, primarily soil depth and workability of the underlying rocks and sediments, which may be used to calculate the eroded soil. We estimate the rate of erosion by water (tons ha-1 year-1) applying the Universal Soil Loss Equation model. The map of soil content (tons ha21) to the effective rooting depth was divided by the map of soil erosion rate to obtain the risk of erosion by water in Sicily, expressed in te…