The use of PESERA modelling to guide the choice of Soil and Water Conservation strategies Mike Kirkby and

Brian Irvine: School of Geography, University of Leeds, UK

Introduction:
Desertification is the degradation of land in arid, semi-arid and dry sub-humid areas, resulting from various factors, including climatic variations and human activities (UNCCD, 1994). Major processes of desertification include soil erosion by water or wind, over-grazing, salinisation and wildfire. Water scarcity and climatic variability underlie many of these processes, leading to unreliable crop yields and so also threatening sustainable livelihoods. At a coarse scale, Climate is the most important fixed control on the relative severity of the various desertification risks, although, within a local area, impacts are also strongly influenced by soil properties and topography, and modified by land use choice and conservation practices. The soil and water conservation (SWC) strategies that are most appropriate for minimizing desertification at any site should be tailored to the types of risk present, as well as to local socioeconomic conditions. Here we seek to map the main desertification risks across Europe as determined by climatic factors, to provide one set of constraints on possible transferability of SWC strategies between areas. All of these risks tend to increase along a gradient towards greater aridity (Fig.1), but the pattern is significantly different between the various desertification processes (Fig.2). For example, water erosion risk is closely linked to the frequency distribution of overland flow: wind erosion is linked to sparse vegetation and dry soils: Overgrazing risk is linked to sparse vegetation: Wildfire is associated with substantial dry biomass and salinisation with low gradients and seasonal alternations of leaching and evaporative conditions

Methodology:

The variation in risk associated with climatic differences are assessed using UEA-CRU gridded monthly climatic data, interpolated at a resolution of 10 arc minutes (ca 15 km) to represent the period 1960-90 (New et al, 2002). A 50-year monthly synthetic climate record is created from the average values and their distributions. After estimating monthly potential evapotranspiration (Hargreaves & Samani, 1982), these data are used to drive a simulation model (Fig.3), based on a simplified version of PESERA (Kirkby et al, 2008), a coarse scale hydrological and erosion model that partitions each months precipitation into snow, subsurface flow, infiltration- and saturation excess overland flow and actual E-T, , using a modification of the Budyko method. Actual E-T in turn drives the growth of natural vegetation and provides a dynamic interaction with the climate that influences the monthly variations in soil moisture, biomass, cover and the runoff thresholds for overland flow, estimating both the annual cycle and inter-annual variability for the synthetic record. The various desertification risks are assessed, month by month, from the components of this model, estimating both averages and variability within and between years. For each desertification risk, the model makes a semi-quantitative estimate of the process rates associated with the natural vegetation cover. These values have been mapped across Europe, and the risks interpreted along a scale from negligible, through moderate to severe. As well as estimating the climatic component of the exposure to these explicit risks, the model is able to identify the general conditions for water scarcity and the impact of inter-annual variability on potential crop yields. The six categories of risk that have been distinguished are: Water Erosion Fire Salinisation Water Scarcity Variability in crop yields Overgrazing. A seventh category, wind erosion, has not been considered as its impact is relatively slight in Europe, although important elsewhere.

Result and interpretation: The maps (Fig. 4-6) show the

estimated intensities of the desertification processes, as estimated by the model. In looking at these maps, it should be remembered that they refer to natural vegetation cover. Thus, for example, the risk of water erosion may be much greater under an arable crop, which, with conventional tillage, leaves the surface largely unprotected prior to sowing and in the early stages of crop development. It may be seen that all desertification risks are greatest in southern Europe, but that the patterns respond to different components of the climate. Water erosion responds most strongly to intense rains at the end of the dry season, when surfaces are least protected, and therefore is focussed on south and west facing coasts. The risk of fire is greatest where there is the greatest dry fuel load, balancing enough moisture for strong forest growth with strong seasonal aridity, giving a distribution that focuses more on seasonally humid areas such as the Cantabrian Mountains. Salinisation is greatest for low lying areas, where shallow groundwater evaporates seasonally, and is therefore strongest for east-facing plains, such as the Po valley or the Great Hungarian plain. To compare disparate processes, the range of values for each process across Europe have been expressed as percentiles (100% for the most severe conditions in each process). These values have been plotted for 4 DESIRE study sites in Europe to show how the profile of risk varies between sites (Fig.7). It is also possible to compare percentiles to map the dominant risk for each area, and areas where no risk reaches the highest quartile (Fig.8).

References:
Hargreaves, G.H., Z.A. Samani, 1982, Estimating potential evapotranspiration. ASCE J. Irrigation & Drainage Division, 108, 225-230. Kirkby, M.J., Irvine, B.J., Jones, R.J.A., Govers, G., & the PESERA team, 2008. The PESERA coarse scale erosion model for Europe: I Model rationale and implementation . European Journal of Soil Science. 59(6), 1293-1306 New, M., Lister, D., Hulme, M. and Makin, I., 2002. A high resolution data set of surface climate over global land areas. Climate Research 21

Mike Kirkby: m.j.kirkby@leeds.ac.uk Brian Irvine: b.j.irvine@leeds.ac.uk

School of Geography, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK

http://www.geog.leeds.ac.uk/ http://www.desire-project.eu/