Chris Renschler

Enhancing Regional Capacities for Assessing Soil Erosion and the Efficiency of Agricultural Soil Conservation Strategies through Fallout Radionuclides

A map showing soil loss at Marchouch, Morocco.

Existing isotope techniques and process modeling together are complementary for providing more reliable and more detailed data to end-users (Renschler, 2016). Using process-based approaches enable to produce more detailed soil and water conservation analysis of the past and future impact studies under changes of land use and/or climate. Event-based, stochastic and dynamic results with GeoWEPP (Renschler, 2002) enable building and analyzing more realistic and more spatially and temporal explicit scenarios in contrast to very general empirical long-term average models such as conventional long-term annual average, deterministic models based on the Universal Soil Loss Equation (USLE) or its Revised Version (RUSLE).

More information about this case study (p. 43 ff.) and recommendations fora geospatia I sampling strategy to support soil erosion modeling research can be found in the just recently released United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) publication by Fulajtar, Ma bit, Renschler and Lee Zhi Yi (2017) "Use of 137Cs for soil erosion assessment". ISBN: 978-92-5-130050-3. This publication is for free download.