Soil Erosion and Sustainable Land Management (SLM)

Dear Colleagues,

Soil erosion-induced land degradation is one of the top soil threats identified in the 2015 Status of the World’s Soil Resources report. Many studies have found that the risk of degradation will get worse because of the unsustainable use of the limited land and water resources under scenarios of climate and land-use changes, and population growth. On the other hand, the proper identification and implementation of sustainable land management (SLM) practices are believed to offer a triple-win solution of conserving the resources, increasing agricultural productivity, and improving human livelihood and well-being. 

However, success in fighting land degradation through SLM requires an improved understanding and documentation of land degradation processes and their risks, as well as the development and adoption of mitigation techniques and approaches. Published figures on global soil erosion show huge variations (20–200 Gton), suggesting that the available estimates remain very uncertain. Moreover, despite the fact that over 825 SLM practices and 360 approaches are documented worldwide, there is a great need to clarify their impacts in different contexts, and to adopt and optimize them under different conditions. There is still a need to develop more refined soil erosion assessment techniques and new SLM technologies and approaches using world-wide increased data availability resulting from field observation, monitoring, remote sensing, and/or modelling.

This Special Issue on the topic of “Soil Erosion and SLM” invites new works that address  understanding the rates, causes, and consequences of soil erosion, mainly by water and wind, as well as the development and evaluation of SLM technologies from different perspectives of SLM, through an improvement in ecosystem regulating  services (e.g., climate, soil, water, nutrient, organic matter, and biomass), land productivity (e.g., food and fodder), and livelihood and human well-being (e.g., economic returns, poverty reduction, and health improvement), targeting geographic regions where the risk of erosion-caused land degradation and the potential for its alleviation through SLM are plausible under present and future scenarios.

Prof. Atsushi Tsunekawa
Dr. Nigussie Haregeweyn
Guest Editors

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