Challenges and Solutions in Soil and Water Conservation

Dear Colleagues,

Soil erosion is among the major soil threats identified in the Status of the World’s Soil Resources report (FAO, 2015). Its consequences do not only affect agriculture but also environment and health. Therefore, the implementation of successful soil and water conservation measures is a key point for ensuring a sustainable and food-secure world (Global Symposium on Soil Erosion, 2019).

This Special Issue aims to cover any topic related to the design, implementation, and effects of traditional or innovative soil and water conservation measures in water-erosion-susceptible areas, such as road slopes, low-permeability soils, or agricultural zones. Besides this, this Special Issue intends to gather multidisciplinary approaches covering well-documented techniques, experiments, or modeling approaches to quantify or validate the effectiveness of the developed measures, from laboratory to landscape scales.

We invite submissions addressing the following:

- Scientific evaluation and quantified effects of mitigation measures on soil and water conservation. We will appreciate complex studies where the combination of various techniques and/or costs evaluation is introduced.

- New methods or techniques that may help in the assessment of soil degradation (such as water and sediment tracers, innovative uses of geophysical survey tools, remote sensing, etc.).

- Well-documented experiments that evaluate (preferably quantitatively) the effects of conservation measures on soil degradation.

- Utilization of process-based numerical models to predict or evaluate the effectiveness of conservation measures, as well as regional-scale models with the capability to highlight the hotspots where the conservation measures can be effectively applied. Specifically, we invite authors to submit studies that present novel approaches to the parametrization of conservation measures in the models.

Dr. Gema Guzmán
Dr. David Zumr
Guest Editors

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