Data from: Assessing spatial patterns of soil erosion in a high‐latitude rangeland ...
High‐latitude areas are experiencing rapid change: we therefore need a better understanding of the processes controlling soil erosion in these environments. We used a spatiotemporal approach to investigate soil erosion in Svalbarðstunga, Iceland (66° N, 15° W), a degraded rangeland. We used three co...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Dataset |
| Language: | English |
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Dryad
2020
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| Online Access: | https://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.z34tmpg8j https://datadryad.org/stash/dataset/doi:10.5061/dryad.z34tmpg8j |
| Summary: | High‐latitude areas are experiencing rapid change: we therefore need a better understanding of the processes controlling soil erosion in these environments. We used a spatiotemporal approach to investigate soil erosion in Svalbarðstunga, Iceland (66° N, 15° W), a degraded rangeland. We used three complementary datasets: 1) high‐resolution UAV imagery collected from 12 sites (total area ~0.75 km2); 2) historical imagery of the same sites; and 3) a simple, spatially‐explicit cellular automata model. Sites were located along a gradient of increasing altitude and distance from the sea, and varied in erosion severity (5–47% eroded). We found that there was no simple relationship between location along the environmental gradient and the spatial characteristics of erosion. Patch‐size frequency distributions lacked a characteristic scale of variation, but followed a power‐law distribution on five of the 12 sites. Present total eroded area is poorly related to current, site‐scale levels of environmental stress, but ... : See paper for details. All images collected in August 2017. ... |
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