Soil erosion assessment approaches: overview and specificities under post-fire conditions

Authors are deeply grateful to the invaluable contribution of a vast number of students and collaborators to most of the field research developed and presented in this work. Authors are also grateful to the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT, Portugal) for financial support through national funds FCT/MCTES (PIDDAC) to CIMO (UIDB/00690/2020 and UIDP/00690/2020) and SusTEC(LA/P/0007/2021). Authors wish to acknowledge the support of several projects allowing the implementation and test of methodologies presented in this work, namely the most recent ones: TERRAMATER (grant 0701_TERRAMATER_1_E, POCTEP programme), BIOma (grant POCI-1-0247-FEDER-046112, Portugal 2020), Man4Health (NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000060, FEDER - “Sistema de Apoio à Investigação Científica e Tecnológica”), SOILING (Project 11 - Call 5 - SOILING, EEA Grants) and ForestWaterUp (13/REACT-EU/2021, COMPETE2020; Nº 181557).
Soil erosion by water addresses natural phenomena integrating in a complex way several physical processes, involving energy and mass transfer from the atmosphere to the soil surface along actual topographical gradients. This complexity generates complexity in both selection of assessment methods and interpretation of assessment results. It is therefore important to clearly identify the object under assessment in order to reduce such fundamental constraints, which is not always a simple matter.

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