- Article
Spatiotemporal Assessment of Soil Erosion Under Historical and Projected Land-Use Scenarios in the Myjava Basin, Slovakia
- Aditya Nugraha Putra,
- Roman Výleta and
- Silvia Kohnová
- + 1 author
Soil erosion remains a critical global concern, yet long-term catchment-scale assessments that explicitly link historical land-use transitions with erosion responses remain limited. This study evaluates how ±240 years record of historical and projected land-use changes influence soil erosion in the Myjava Basin by integrating parcel-level land-use reconstructions from 1787 to 2030 into a distributed USLE-2D framework. R, K, and parcel-based C and P factors were temporally standardized, and LS was derived using an ensemble of four widely applied algorithms. A PCA was applied to quantify the relative contribution of RUSLE factors across time, and all analyses were performed within a reproducible geospatial modelling environment. The results indicated a long-term decline in total erosion of ±78% at the landscape scale and ±60% within arable land from the 19th century to the present, driven mainly by a major reduction in arable land (from ±62% to ±37%) and expansion of forest and shrub vegetation. Despite this decline, persistent hotspots remain concentrated on steep upland slopes with high LS (>10%), while agricultural parcels experienced erosion rates 10–20 times higher than the basin-wide mean across all periods. PCA shows that LS and rainfall erosivity dominate erosion variability (PC loadings ±0.78–0.84), while C and P factors increase in influence in recent and projected periods, contributing up to ±40% of total explained variance. These findings demonstrate that long-term land-use transitions have substantially reduced basin-scale erosion risk.
18 January 2026






![Fossolo network with labels for the pipes, nodes, the reservoir, and the relevant valve. A spatial visualization of the search results for the location of an additional pressure-reducing valve (PRV). Each pipe is marked with a PRV icon color-coded by the MAE bin (see legend). The best candidate is highlighted by a larger green icon and the worst by a larger red icon. In all runs, PRV 59 was kept fixed while PRV 58 was moved across pipes; MAE is computed for the pressure at Node 21 relative to the 30 [m] reference.](https://mdpi-res.com/water/water-18-00253/article_deploy/html/images/water-18-00253-g001-550.jpg)



