Erosion-induced carbon redistribution, burial and mineralisation — Is the episodic nature of erosion processes important?

• Event driven long-term modelling of soil organic carbon redistribution
• Soil organic carbon enrichment and depletion
• Catchment scale erosion affected carbon balance
• Erosion event effects on spatial patterns of soil organic carbon

There is still an ongoing scientific discussion regarding the importance of erosion-induced lateral soil organic carbon (SOC) redistribution for the burial and/or mineralisation of carbon and the resulting long-term C balance at the catchment scale. Especially the effects of the event driven nature of water erosion and the potentially associated enrichment of SOC in sediment delivery are still unclear. In general, two processes lead to enrichment of SOC: (i) enrichment due to selective interrill erosion at erosion sites, and (ii) enrichment due to selective depletion at deposition sites. In this study, the conceptual soil erosion and SOC turnover model SPEROS-C was adapted to integrate these processes and applied in a small arable catchment (4.2 ha) in Germany for a 57-year period. A total number of 901 model runs were performed with different realisations of frequency and magnitude of water erosion as well as realisations of enrichment and depletion ratios taken from literature and compared to a reference model run representing mean annual erosion without enrichment processes. In general, our modelling study indicates that ignoring temporal variability and enrichment processes may lead to a substantial misinterpretation of erosion-induced C fluxes. Especially the vertical C flux (difference between C inputs from plant assimilates and organic fertilizer and SOC mineralisation) at deposition sites strongly depends on the model parameterisation ranging from a maximum C source of − 336 g C m− 2 to a maximum C sink of 44 g C m− 2. In combination with a substantially higher C export due to enrichment processes, the overall C balance of the catchment potentially turns into a maximum C source of − 44 g C m− 2 at the end of the simulation period compared to a C source of − 1 g C m− 2 for the reference run.