3.2 Estimated soil erosion rates under climate
scenarios
The simulated SE rates were averaged for the whole watershed over a
period of 20 years providing a value of 3.3, 2.9, and 3.0 t/ha/year for
the HIST, RCP 4.5, and RCP 8.5 scenarios, respectively. Maximum SE rates
were also estimated providing a value of 25.3, 23.1 and 26.1 t/ha/year
for the HIST, RCP 4.5, and RCP 8.5, respectively. The average value of
SE for HIST, RCP 4.5 and RCP 8.5 in each HRU was used as a single point
estimate to obtain a spatial distribution of the SE phenomenon over the
entire basin, applying the kriging interpolation method. The spatialized
data were grouped in 5 classes of SE susceptibility following the
classification proposed by Panagos et al. (2015a): very low (SE ≤ 1.0
t/ha/year), low (1.0 <SE≤ 2.5 t/ha/year), medium (2.5
<SE≤ 4.0 t/ha/year), high (4.0 <SE≤ 5.5 t/ha/year),
and very high (SE > 5.5 t/ha/year). The susceptibility maps
of the basin are showed in Figure 6. The SE susceptibility of the area
during the reference period (HIST) shows the highest values in the
central and southern parts of the study site, while the lowest values
are estimated for the eastern border of the basin and in the northern
area (Fig. 5a). In future conditions (RCP 4.5 in Fig. 5b and RCP 8.5 in
Fig. 5c) the distribution of the SE susceptibility remains similar to
the one of the HIST scenario, in terms of spatial distribution of the
areas most prone to SE risk (Fig. 5a). In all cases, the portions of the
basins most susceptible to SE are located in correspondence to Leptosols
(Fig. 2c). The most interesting results were observed calculating the
patterns of SE change between the future projections (RCP 4.5 and 8.5)
and the HIST scenario (Fig. 6), obtained using a spatial difference
through raster calculator in GIS environment.