SERENA EJPSoil Soil erosion control in Tuscany (Italy)

The internal EJP SOIL project SERENA contributed to the evaluation of soil multifunctionality aiming at providing assessment tools for land planning and soil policies at different scales. By co-working with relevant stakeholders, the project provided co-developed indicators and associated cookbooks to assess and map them, to report both on soil degradation, soil-based ecosystem services and their bundles, under actual conditions and for climate and land-use changes, at the regional, national, and European scales.

One of the objective of SERENA project was to develop methods to calculate and map soil-based ecosystem services and soil threats. The present data was prepared according to the methodology of the SERENA Soil erosion and soil erosion control cookbook.  Soil loss was used as an indicator for soil erosion (ST). The map of soil mass not eroded was based on the RUSLE model. Soil erosion control was calculated as the difference between potential and actual soil erosion (SES, ecosystem service of soil erosion protection, i.e. soil eroded mass retained by vegetation, Mg/ha/y). For Italy, the cookbook was applied in the Tuscany region.  

To create the soil loss map we used: 

• for R-factor, not freely available database of meteorological parameters spatialized at 250 m (minimum and maximum daily air temperature; cumulate daily precipitation) over Tuscany region (period 1990–2022, Lamma Consortium)  and a local linear equation between R and mean annual precipitation (P);
• for C -factor, Regional Land use map 1:10.000 (2018, freely available at: https://www502.regione.toscana.it/geoscopio/usocoperturasuolo.html) and ESDAC method (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2015.05.021) ;  
• for K-factor, sand, silt, clay, and O.C. (%) maps (built from 4.000 soil profiles, following FAO’s methodology in GSP-GSOC map, Lamma Consortium), and Torri et al. (1997) function;
• for LS-factor, DEM 10 m of Tuscany, (freely available at https://www502.regione.toscana.it/geoscopio/cartoteca.html99) and Desmet & Govers (1996) SAGA tool (applied at 10 m and upscaled);
• for P-factor, not freely available database 1:10.00 of terraced areas (Lamma Consortium, 2020) (for terraced areas a multiplication factor of  0.5  was considered, based on expert evaluation)
• for P-factor, not freely available database 1:10.00 of terraced areas (Lamma Consortium, 2020) (for terraced areas a multiplication factor of  0.5  was considered, based on expert evaluation) 

Maps was delivered in the GeoTIFF format in the resolution of 100m.  

Delivered data will be validated by stakeholders from Italy (scientist) in October, 2024.