Frameworks for Monitoring and Forecasting of Land Erosion

Land erosion is defined as the quantitative and qualitative reduction of the land availability driven by aeolian and fluvial processes and causes devastating impacts on human lives and ecosystems by altering and degrading environments. Such impacts are manifested in various forms of global issues that are receiving increasing attention, particularly as dust generation, soil loss, loss of agricultural productivity, and reduction of habitable space and quality of life of impacted communities. Despite the potentially devastating consequences of increasing land erosion, this process is generally under-studied and also poorly resolved with conventional technologies. Therefore, establishing and testing technical frameworks for monitoring land erosion and its spatio-temporal patterns and dynamics is of primary concern to many entities. To achieve this, intermittent and isolated approaches for observing land erosion need to be assessed and restructured from an interdisciplinary perspective.

In this context, this Research Topic will offer the opportunity to propose innovative technologies for measuring and forecasting land erosion, and demonstrate their applicability. From a technical viewpoint, we aim to introduce methodologies for detecting land erosion by the front-end technologies such as global remote sensing data, machine vision processing and numerical modeling. Recent trends integrating multiple source data and observations with machine learning provide a powerful framework but need to be evaluated rigorously. Thus, such interdisciplinary studies should be demonstrated and promoted to the research community and organizations that need to deal with global land erosion issues.

Given the lack of understanding of the geological, geomorphological and pedological contexts of aeolian and fluvial erosion, this Research Topic will also provide a publication platform for the research of land erosion process centered on geological/geomorphological backgrounds and soil degradation. Therefore, contributions to this collection are expected to provide the latest scientific advances in land erosion measurement, forecasting, management and mitigation approaches. The local and global stakeholders as well as the scientific communities will benefit extensively from the publications in this Research Topic.

This Research Topic invites contributions of a variety of state-of-the-art technology/practical application research approaches that quantitatively measure/monitor land erosion covering aeolian, fluvial, and anthropogenic origins. Both Original Research and Review article types are invited. The scope of the collection includes the topics stated below, but are not limited to:

• Observation techniques for land erosion by the means of remote sensing and in-situ tools;
• Contributions regarding soil degradation as a major factor of land erosion are particularly recommended;
• Modeling schemes for estimating current and future land erosion;
• Geological and geomorphological contexts of land erosion processes and extension to comparative studies;
• Integrated frameworks of observation and modelling tools via middleware technology such as machine learning;
• Case studies of land erosion monitoring employing newly developed or existing technical frameworks over different contexts such as delta, arid desert, estuary and coastal lines.