Soil erosion forms a major threat to European soil resources, soil being a vital and largely non-renewable resource. Therefore, there is a concern about this issue at european level. Assessing and monitoring soil erosion is needed to evaluate the impact of, inter alia, agricultural and land use policies in Europe. A case-study at a commune (NUTS4) level has been developed in order to comparate two ways of applying the USLE equation (a model adjusted by Motoc, and also PESERA model). The input data are the soil map at the scale 1:200 000, a soil map for Adamclisi at the scale 1:10 000, as well as the grid 1km x 1km with the soil loss from running the European PESERA Model. Firstly, the area affected by the soil erosion process are designed based on the soil maps at the two scales. The second step was to assess the water erosion risk, based on the information from 1:200 000 soil map. Thirdly, a model of calculating the potential soil loss using USLE equation, adapted by Motoc and Simota, in two cases – land with and without cannopy – have been runned. The erosivity and erodability coefficient are assessed using expert judgement, the slope and the aspect have been calculated using ArcView modules. Finnally, the PESERA model (Pan-European Soil Erosion Risk Assessment) has been runned, and the outputs have been compared with the outputs from the previous model. It can be noticed that there is a similitude between the soil loss from PESERA with that  from soil map at the scale 1: 200 000, but there is a difference in the magnitude for the two models, the area affected by erosion process being approximately the same.

soil erosion; USLE equation; PESERA model

Presentation: oral