文章基本信息

标题：Environmental stochasticity controls soil erosion variability
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作者：Jongho Kim ; Valeriy Y. Ivanov ; Simone Fatichi 等
期刊名称：Scientific Reports
电子版ISSN：2045-2322
出版年度：2016
卷号：6
期号：1
DOI：10.1038/srep22065
语种：English
出版社：Springer Nature
摘要：Understanding soil erosion by water is essential for a range of research areas but the predictive skill of prognostic models has been repeatedly questioned because of scale limitations of empirical data and the high variability of soil loss across space and time scales. Improved understanding of the underlying processes and their interactions are needed to infer scaling properties of soil loss and better inform predictive methods. This study uses data from multiple environments to highlight temporal-scale dependency of soil loss: erosion variability decreases at larger scales but the reduction rate varies with environment. The reduction of variability of the geomorphic response is attributed to a 'compensation effect': temporal alternation of events that exhibit either source-limited or transport-limited regimes. The rate of reduction is related to environment stochasticity and a novel index is derived to reflect the level of variability of intra- and inter-event hydrometeorologic conditions. A higher stochasticity index implies a larger reduction of soil loss variability (enhanced predictability at the aggregated temporal scales) with respect to the mean hydrologic forcing, offering a promising indicator for estimating the degree of uncertainty of erosion assessments.