SoilErosionDB: A global database for surface runoff and soil erosion evaluation

Soil erosion is a major threat to soil resources, continuing to cause environmental degradation and social poverty in many parts of the world. Many field and laboratory experiments have been performed over the past century to study spatio-temporal patterns of soil erosion caused by surface runoff under different environmental conditions. However, these historical data have never been integrated together in a way that can inform current and future efforts to understand and model soil erosion at different scales. Here, we designed a database (SoilErosionDB) to compile field and laboratory measurements of soil erosion caused by surface runoff, with data coming from sites across the globe. The SoilErosionDB includes 18 columns for soil erosion related indicators and 73 columns for background information that describe factors such as latitude, longitude, climate, elevation, and soil type. Currently, measurements from 99 geographic sites and 22 countries around the world have been compiled into SoilErosionDB. We provide examples of linking SoilErosionDB with an external climate dataset and using annual precipitation to explain annual soil erosion variability under different environmental conditions. All data and code to reproduce the results in this study can be found at: Jian, J., Du, X., Stewart, R., Tan, Z. and Bond-Lamberty, B.: jinshijian/SoilErosionDB: First release of SoilErosionDB, Zenodo, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4030875, 2020b. All data are also available through GitHub: https://github.com/jinshijian/SoilErosionDB.