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In Southwest China (SWC) soil loss is becoming a serious threat to the sustainable development of resources and the health of the environment. A large number of studies have been conducted to investigate the causes (e.g. environmental factors and human activities) and impacts (e.g. karst rocky desertification) of soil loss. However, the following are some important problems related to soil loss in the karst of SWC: 1) although soil loss is caused by chemical weathering, gravity and water interaction in karst, the mechanisms by which soil loss takes place in the SWC and their interaction are still not clear; 2) subsurface soil loss varies under different geological and hydrological conditions, and there is still no consensus on the common the ratio between surface soil erosion and underground soil loss; 3) traditional methods for soil loss risk assessment are difficult to apply over the whole of SWC; and 4) a large number of studies have been published only in Chinese and remain inaccessible to the international science community. Therefore, a review paper is needed to address this gap and introduce the contributions of Chinese researchers to soil loss in karst. This paper proposes a novel modelling approach for the grouped soil loss styles and presents a comprehensive discussion for the mechanism, causes, and risk assessment of the various soil loss styles in SWC karst.