Soil erosion risk, Sicilian Region (1:250,000)

Assessing the risk of soil erosion caused by water at the regional level is important for currentand future planning of land use and environmental actions to combat land degradation. Thegravity of the risk depends not only on the rate of soil erosion by water, but also on otherfactors, primarily soil depth and workability of the underlying rocks and sediments, whichmay be used to calculate the eroded soil. We estimate the rate of erosion by water(tons ha-1 year-1) applying the Universal Soil Loss Equation model. The map of soilcontent (tons ha21) to the effective rooting depth was divided by the map of soil erosionrate to obtain the risk of erosion by water in Sicily, expressed in terms of years of completeloss of soil cover. This map was intersected with a map of workability of the underlyingbedrock to give advice on where the cost of soil recovery by deep ripping and rock grindingare very high. 8382.9 km2 (32.6% of the Sicilian territory) were rated as at high or veryhigh risk (< 100 years), of which 1230.9 km2 developed on bedrock with low workabilityand so very costly to be recovered.