Soil erosion is a severe hazard that erodes large amounts of fruitful soils by water and wind. The associated loss of arable soils all over the world is causing damage of several billion US dollars, especially in arid and semiarid regions.

What seems to be a modern “creeping natural hazard” has been occurring in Central Europe for thousands of years and started approximately 7500 years ago when the first Neolithic farmers arrived.

The D3 project focuses on large-scale soil erosion in Central Europe over these last 7500 years. Major research questions are: How much soil has been eroded through human impact since the beginning of agriculture in the Rhineland regions? With what intensity did the process happen during different cultural periods? And how much of the eroded soil is still stored on the hillslopes?

This is what we are trying to quantify by soil erosion models based on digital terrain models and reconstructed land use scenarios. Currently, we are applying different models to simulate sediment redistribution during past periods on different spatial scales.

A major concern of our project and many other projects of the CRC 806 is the question of scale: How do we derive large-scale information from our local empirical point data? What do local soil profiles tell us about soil erosion processes on a field of a few hectares, a small catchment of a few square kilometres or a large catchment of more than 10,000 km²? Current progress regarding these questions has been made by D-Cluster, which includes a critical discussion of scaling issues and the broader implications of socio-environmental research.