Pasquale Borrelli

Università Degli Studi Roma Tre | UNIROMA3 · Department of Science

Human activity and related land use change are the primary cause of accelerated soil erosion, which has substantial implications for nutrient and carbon cycling, land productivity and in turn, worldwide socio-economic conditions. Here we present an unprecedentedly high resolution (250×250m) global potential soil erosion model, using a combination o...

Free-flowing rivers (FFRs) support diverse, complex and dynamic ecosystems globally, providing important societal and economic services. Infrastructure development threatens the ecosystem processes, biodiversity and services that these rivers support. Here we assess the connectivity status of 12 million kilometres of rivers globally and identify th...

Soil erosion is a serious threat to soil functions leading to land productivity decline and multiple off-site effects. Here we show, using a multi-model approach, the spatial risk of soil erosion by water, wind, tillage and harvesting and where the co-occurrence of these different processes is observed. Moreover, we analysed where these locations o...

Significance We use the latest projections of climate and land use change to assess potential global soil erosion rates by water to address policy questions; working toward the goals of the United Nations working groups under the Inter-Governmental Technical Panel on Soils of the Global Soil Partnership. This effort will enable policy makers to exp...

Soil phosphorus (P) loss from agricultural systems will limit food and feed production in the future. Here, we combine spatially distributed global soil erosion estimates (only considering sheet and rill erosion by water) with spatially distributed global P content for cropland soils to assess global soil P loss. The world's soils are currently bei...

Soil erosion is one of the principal drivers of land degradation, with numerous onsite effects on soil availability and quality, and off-site impacts in freshwater environments. The environmental, economic and political impacts of land degradation motivate a comprehensive scientific understanding of the physical processes controlling soil detachmen...

This report investigates the intricate interplay between the drivers of changes in soil health, along with the pressures and impacts on soil in the 32 European Environment Agency (EEA) member countries, as well as six cooperating countries from the West Balkans, Ukraine, and the UK. It sheds light on the multifaceted challenges facing soil conserva...

While significant progress has been achieved in researching water erosion, our understanding of global patterns and the magnitude of wind soil erosion remains limited. Here, we present a comprehensive assessment using the revised wind erosion equation (RWEQ) of the global rates and long‐term trends (1982–2019) of wind erosion using a spatially expl...

Soil erosion is a major land degradation process, threatening global agricultural sustainability and carbon cycling. Although geomorphic evidence confirms that human activities have significantly accelerated soil erosion, to what extent humans have altered soil erosion and how to attribute it to different land use changes and economic activities re...

Numerous hydrological applications, such as soil erosion estimation, water resource management, and rain driven damage assessment, demand accurate and reliable rainfall erosivity data. However, the scarcity of gauge rainfall records and the inherent uncertainty in satellite and reanalysis-based rainfall datasets limit rainfall erosivity assessment...

Spatial accurate mapping of land susceptibility to wind erosion is necessary to mitigate its destructive consequences. In this research, for the first time, we developed a novel methodology based on deep learning (DL) and active learning (AL) models, their combination (e.g., recurrent neural network (RNN), RNN-AL, gated recurrent units (GRU), and G...

The Tibetan Plateau (TP) is suffering from a substantial decline in terrestrial water storage (TWS) in exorheic basins, threatening water resources that are critical for ∼2 billion people downstream. TWS changes are commonly estimated using gravity satellites through observations of the total terrestrial mass storage (TMS) change, with an implicit...

Healthy soils are essential for sustainable food production, achieving climate neutrality and halting the loss of biodiversity. The European Commission turned the spotlights on these vital aspects of soils with the launch of the EU Soil Observatory (EUSO) in 2021 to support the European Green Deal. Also, the EU Soil Strategy for 2030 and the propos...

Land degradation is a complex socio-environmental threat, which generally occurs as multiple concurrent pathways that remain largely unexplored in Europe. Here we present an unprecedented analysis of land multi-degradation in 40 continental countries, using twelve dataset-based processes that were modelled as land degradation convergence and combin...

Modeling monthly rainfall erosivity is vital to the optimization of measures to control soil erosion. Rain gauge data combined with satellite observations can aid in enhancing rainfall erosivity estimations. Here, we presented a framework which utilized Geographically Weighted Regression approach to model global monthly rainfall erosivity. The fram...

Soils have achieved prominence in the political agenda of the European Commission with the proposal for a Soil Monitoring Law and the ambitious Soil Mission research framework. The EU Soil Observatory (EUSO) used the latest state-of-the-art pan-European datasets to propose a preliminary assessment of soil health in the EU based on 18 soil degradati...

The food production system has become the largest driver of biodiversity loss today. Here we apply a quantitative and spatially explicit framework to provide an integrated perspective on how a partial or complete transition to healthier diets would affect different dimensions of biodiversity change and compare the effects to a bundle of alternative...

The topsoil Land Use and Cover Area frame Statistical survey (LUCAS) aims at collecting harmonised data about the state of soil health over the extent of European Union (EU). In the LUCAS 2018 survey, bulk density has been analysed for three depths, i.e., 0-10 cm = 6140 sites; 10-20 cm = 5684 sites and 20-30 cm =139 sites. The laboratory analysis a...

New policy developments have emerged about soil conservation after 2020. The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) 2023–2027, the proposal for a Soil Monitoring Law, and the mission ‘A Soil Deal for Europe’ have shaped a new policy framework at the EU level, which requires updated assessments on soil erosion and land degradation. The EU Soil Observatory...

Soil loss by water erosion represents a key threat to land degradation worldwide. This study employs an integrated quantitative modelling approach to estimate its long-term global sustainability impacts. The global biophysical model estimates a mean increase of soil erosion rates of between 30 and 66% over the period 2015–2070 under alternative cli...

Soil erosion is expected to increase in the future due to climate change. Soil erosion models are useful tools that can be used by decision makers and other stakeholders to deal with soil erosion problems or the implementation of soil protection measures. Most of the modelling applications are using Universal Soil Loss Equation (USLE)-type models....

Future phosphorus (P) shortages could seriously affect terrestrial productivity and food security. We investigated the changes in topsoil available P (AP) and total P (TP) in China's forests, grasslands, paddy fields, and upland croplands during the 1980s–2010s based on substantial repeated soil P measurements (63,220 samples in the 1980s, 2000s, a...

Numerous drivers such as farming practices, erosion, land-use change, and soil biogeochemical background, determine the global spatial distribution of phosphorus (P) in agricultural soils. Here, we revised an approach published earlier (called here GPASOIL-v0), in which several global datasets describing these drivers were combined with a process m...

Soil erosion is both a major driver and consequence of land degradation with significant on-site and off-site costs which are critical to understand and quantify. One major cost of soil erosion originates from the sediments delivered to aquatic systems (e.g., rivers, lakes, and seas), which may generate a broad array of environmental and economic i...

Although the cause-and-effect relationship between accelerated soil erosion and human activities has been confirmed by geological records, the magnitude and socio-economic drivers of the anthropogenic contribution remain largely unexplained at the country scale. Here, we present an integrated modelling framework that uses multi-source high spatial...

Hazardous hydrological events cause soil erosion and it is essential to anticipate the potential environmental impacts of prevailing erosion processes that occur at different time-scales. Here, we present the modelling of net soil erosion rates for the Bradano River Basin (southern Italy), based on rainfall erosivity, surface overland flow and tran...

USLE-type models are widely used to estimate average annual soil loss at large scales, with the erodibility factor (K) being the sole component that accounts for soil's susceptibility to erosion. The factor includes the information on permeability in the equation, however, most definitions of the K factor consider the soil hydrological influence on...

Culture and proverbs have common elements and characteristics (Illustration 1): they are learned and shared, take time to develop, and are transmitted across generations, subject to change and not isolated. Soil proverbs are culturally loaded; they are expressed using concise language and regarded as one of the most ancient and valuable manifestati...

As a network of researchers we release an open-access database (EUSEDcollab) of water discharge and suspended sediment yield time series records collected in small to medium sized catchments in Europe. EUSEDcollab is compiled to overcome the scarcity of open-access data at relevant spatial scales for studies on runoff, soil loss by water erosion an...

Soil erosion is a complex process involving multiple natural and anthropic agents, causing the deterioration of multiple components comprising soil health. Here, we provide an estimate of the spatial patterns of cropland susceptibility to erosion by sheet and rill, gully, wind, tillage, and root crops harvesting and report the co-occurrence of thes...

Here, we present and release the Global Rainfall Erosivity Database (GloREDa), a multi-source platform containing rainfall erosivity values for almost 4000 stations globally. The database was compiled through a global collaboration between a network of researchers, meteorological services and environmental organisations from 65 countries. GloREDa i...

We provide a new dataset of simulated suspended sediment discharge for South American rivers using daily hydrologic-hydrodynamic modeling. From the previous version (10.17632/k7c5482fsm.1) we improved our results by simulating 234 large reservoirs in South America and also by considering 8 land use and land cover maps. We also extended our simulate...

River sediment fluxes have been impacted in South America (SA), one of the continents with the highest erosion and sediment transport rates globally. However, the magnitude and spatio‐temporal distribution of the main drivers of changes have been poorly identified and explored. Here, we performed simulations using a hydrological‐hydrodynamic‐sedime...

Land conservation and increased carbon uptake on land are fundamental to achieving the ambitious targets of the climate and biodiversity conventions. Yet, it remains largely unknown how such ambitions, along with an increasing demand for agricultural products, could drive landscape-scale changes and affect other key regulating nature’s contribution...

Rainfall erosivity is a key factor that influences soil erosion by water. Rain-gauge measurements are commonly used to estimate rainfall erosivity. However, long-term gauge records with sub-hourly resolutions are lacking in large parts of the world. Satellite observations provide spatially continuous estimates of rainfall, but they are subject to b...

As agricultural land area increases to feed an expanding global population, soil erosion will likely accelerate, generating unsustainable losses of soil and nutrients. This is critical for Kenya where cropland expansion and nutrient loading from runoff and erosion is contributing to eutrophication of freshwater ecosystems and desertification. We us...

Global efforts to deliver internationally agreed goals to reduce carbon emissions, halt biodiversity loss, and retain essential ecosystem services have been poorly integrated. These goals rely in part on preserving natural (e.g., native, largely unmodified) and seminatural (e.g., low intensity or sustainable human use) forests, woodlands, and grass...

Climate change can affect all levels of society and the planet. Recent studies have shown its effects on sediment fluxes in several locations worldwide, which can impact ecosystems and infrastructure such as reservoirs. In this study, we focused on simulating sediment fluxes using projections of future climate change for South America (SA), a conti...

Sediment flows dynamics (erosion, transport and deposition) have been disrupted in South America (SA), a continent with the highest erosion and sediment transport rates globally. However, the magnitude and spatial distribution of the main drivers of changes have been poorly identified and explored. Here, we performed simulations using a hydrologica...

Mercury (Hg) released by anthropogenic activities can bioaccumulate to neurotoxic levels in commonly consumed fish. Global soils are a global long-term storage for atmospheric Hg taken up by vegetation, thereby decreasing the Hg burden to oceans and eventually fish. Anthropogenic activities like deforestation reduce the capacity of the terrestrial...

Soil loss by water erosion represents a key threat to land degradation worldwide. This study employs an integrated quantitative modelling approach to estimate the long-term global sustainability impacts of soil erosion. The global biophysical model estimates a mean increase of soil erosion rates of between 30-66% over the period 2015-2070 under alt...

Rainfall erosivity is the most important factor affecting soil erosion by water. Rainfall erosivity can be estimated from rain gauge measurements and satellite observations. However, long-term gauge data with high temporal resolution are often unavailable in many parts of the world. Satellite observations allow provision of continuous gridded estim...

Sustainable land management (SLM) is widely recognized as the key to reducing rates of land degradation, and preventing desertification. Many efforts have been made worldwide by various stakeholders to adopt and/or develop various SLM practices. Nevertheless, a comprehensive review on the spatial distribution, prospects, and challenges of SLM pract...

Annually, millions of hectares of land are affected by wildfires worldwide, disrupting ecosystems functioning by affecting on-site vegetation, soil, and above- and belowground biodiversity, but also triggering erosive off-site impacts such as water-bodies contamination or mudflows. Here, we present a soil erosion assessment following the 2017's wil...

Promoting sustainable soil management is a possible option for achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions in the future. Several efforts in this area exist, and the application of spatially explicit models to anticipate the effect of possible actions on soils at a regional scale is widespread. Currently, models can simulate the impacts of changes...

Chemical contamination from point source discharges in developed (resource-rich) countries has been widely regulated and studied for decades; however, diffuse sources are largely unregulated and widespread. In the European Union, large dischargers report releases of some chemicals; yet, little is known of total emissions (point and diffuse) and the...

The European Soil Data Centre (ESDAC), hosted by the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC), is the focal point for soil data, support to policy making and awareness raising for the European Union (EU). Established in 2006 to provide harmonised soil‐related information for the EU Member States, and ESDAC currently hosts 88 datasets, 6000...

The crop cover-management (C-) factor in arable landscapes describes the soil erosion susceptibility associated with seasonally cultivated crops. Previous informatic and computational limitations have led many modelling studies to prescribe C-factor values and assume spatial and temporal stationarity. However, the multiple influencing factors rangi...

Despite phosphorus (P) being crucial for plant nutrition and thus food security, excessive P fertilization harms soil and aquatic ecosystems. Accordingly, the European Green Deal and derived strategies aim to reduce P losses and fertilizer consumption in agricultural soils. The objective of this study is to calculate a soil P budget, allowing the q...

Background Advances in climate change research contribute to improved forecasts of hydrological extremes with potentially severe impacts on human societies and natural landscapes. Rainfall erosivity density (RED), i.e. rainfall erosivity (MJ mm hm⁻² h⁻¹ yr⁻¹) per rainfall unit (mm), is a measure of rainstorm aggressiveness and a proxy indicator of...

Healthy soil is the foundation underpinning global agriculture and food security. Soil erosion is currently the most serious threat to soil health, leading to yield decline, ecosystem degradation and economic impacts. Here, we provide high-resolution (ca. 100 × 100 m) global estimates of soil displacement by water erosion obtained using the Revised...

Supplementary Material

The cover management factor (C-factor) calculation requires the assessment of the intra‐annual spatiotemporal variability of biomass cover, owed to the natural growth cycle of vegetation and the impact of agriculture on land cover. However, this is frequently omitted, and the vegetation conditions are approximated by assigning constant values to st...

Cover management and support practices largely control the magnitude and variability of soil erosion. Although soil erosion models account for their importance (particularly by C- and P-factors in the Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation), obtaining spatially explicit quantitative field data on these factors remains challenging. Hence, also our ins...

Promoting sustainable soil management is a possible option for achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions in the future. Several efforts in this area exist, and the application of spatially explicit models to anticipate the effect of possible actions on soils at a regional scale is widespread. Currently, models can simulate the impacts of changes...

Decision-making plays a key role in reducing landslide risk and preventing natural disasters. Land management, recovery of degraded lands, urban planning, and environmental protection in general are fundamental for mitigating landslide hazard and risk. Here, we present a GIS-based multi-scale approach to highlight where and when a country is affect...

Background Pelosols are the Soil of the Year 2022 in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. They represent soils with a high clay content (≥45%) in the diagnostic P horizon. Pelosols are nutrient-rich, have a strong capacity for swelling and shrinking, have a challenging water balance with a high portion of nonplant available water and are affected by h...

Despite recent developments in modeling global soil erosion by water, to date, no substantial progress has been made towards more dynamic inter- and intra-annual assessments. In this regard, the main challenge is still represented by the limited availability of high temporal resolution rainfall data needed to estimate rainfall erosivity. As the ava...