Assessment of soil erosion change and its relationships with land use/cover change in China from the end of the 1980s to 2010

- Water erosion is most widely distributed (56% of land area) in China.
- Wind erosion affects 24% of land area but has the most severe effects.
- Soil erosion was getting worse before 2000 after which it has improved.
- Overall, erosion worsened during the 1980s-2010.

An empirical approach was employed to monitor changes in soil erosion status in China, incorporating landform, slope, vegetation coverage, land use/cover, and expert interpretation of remote sensing images. We built up a National Soil Erosion Database of China (NSED-C) at 1:100,000 scale that contains Chinese soil erosion data for five periods (the end of the 1980s, 1995, 2000, 2005, and 2010), and established the soil erosion situation for China in 2010 and changes in erosion since the end of the 1980s. The results show that water erosion is the most widely distributed erosion type, affecting 56% of the land area of China, followed by wind erosion and freeze-thaw erosion. But the most serious erosion type is wind erosion. Most of the change in soil erosion was concentrated within regions of northern China that have fragile ecosystems, such as the Loess Plateau, Mu Us Sandy Land, Hunshandake Sandy Land, Horqin Sandy Land, Xianghai Wetland and the Tarim River basin. Hilly regions in southern China were also widely affected by differing soil erosion changes. Impacted by some environmental protection measures and economic activities such as reclaim in northern and western China, Grain for Green Project, and planting of fast-growing woods on hills in southern China, two different trends of soil erosion change are identified during the monitoring period: soil erosion in China was getting worse before 2000 after which it has subsequently improved. Nevertheless, a series of environmental protection measures implemented after 2000 did not recover the previous negative impact before, so that the overall soil erosion situation in China in 2010 is worse than at the end of the 1980s.