Project's Description

Soil erosion is considered as a major environmental problem since it seriously threatens natural resources, agriculture and the environment. 5DARE project will assess the impacts of a changing climate, land use, soil moisture, hydrology and vegetation cover on the quantity of erosion processes in catchments area in the Mediterranean. Modelling techniques will be used to project the influence of changes of the above mentioned factors on the major determinants erosion processes at various time and space scales in the near and far future. Regional climate models from CORDEX experiment will provide the essential information on shifting precipitation and temperature patterns, and will feed into erosion models in order to assess the changes in seasonality, amount, and incidence of extreme events in the catchment areas. Field experiments will be conducted in different kind of crop cultivations (orange trees, avocado trees, olive orchards). The main aim of the field experiments will be to calibrate erosion assessment models and upscale soil loss results from farm to regional level. In addition, sophisticated classification algorithms will be applied to Very High and Medium resolution satellite images and Unmanned Aerial Vehicle / Drone images to collect new data sets of Land Use/ Land Cover (LULC), topography and vegetation. The final stage of research will include the selection of the most appropriate erosion model and the forecasting of erosion vulnerability in the near and far future with the use of CA- Markov chain analysis. The above findings on the spatio-temporal erosion distribution will update the current erosion management plans by developing a low cost precise erosion warning systems (GUI) with means of Earth Observation. 5DARE will integrate and synthesize project findings suitable for awareness raising, readily communicable to a wide audience, and relevant for policy negotiations. Furthermore, the project will maintain a dialogue with relevant stakeholders and will provide recommendations for policy makers.