The Assessment of the Actual Soil Erosion Risk in Germany, Based on CORINE Land-Cover and Statistical Data from the Main Representative Survey of Land Use

For the precaution against physical soil degradation in managed soils, accurate planning data about anthropogenic impacts and for policy making applicable indicators to describe the driving force and state are required. To assess the potential erosion risk, accurate information is available, but to assess the actual erosion risk it is necessary to regard current land-use and cultivation data for arable farm land. For this a method was developed to improve the temporal and spatial resolution of the available land-use data. This was performed by combining the European CORINE land-cover data with statistical data on land-use from the "main representative survey of land-use" in Germany. The advantage of using a combination of remote sensing and statistical data is, that it improves information about changes in land-use as well as the spatial distribution, without a new set of remote sensing data and it can be updated frequently with available information. As a result digital maps of actual erosion risk in high spatial resolution are available for Germany. The introduced method is feasible for the assessment of risks in soil degradation, dependent on land-use or crop management, and can be used for monitoring and reporting.