Estimation of soil organic carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus losses induced by wind erosion in Northern China

Abstract

AbstractThe loss of nutrients induced by wind erosion causes serious land degradation. Northern China suffers from severe wind erosion that causes massive amounts of soil nutrients to be lost and results in land degradation. To thoroughly comprehend the mechanisms of land degradation in Northern China, the spatiotemporal distribution of nutrients losses induced by wind erosion must be considered. Therefore, in this study, a wind erosion model was employed to obtain the PM10 emissions in Northern China from 2001 to 2014, and the quantities of soil organic carbon (SOC), total nitrogen (TN), and total phosphorus (TP) entrained by PM10 were obtained using the integrated soil database of China. The results showed that the losses of SOC, TN, and TP induced by wind erosion were 0.894, 0.184, and 0.123 Tg/a, respectively, and the spatial distributions of these three nutrients differed from one another. According to the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer land‐cover data, the nutrients lost from desert ecosystems contributed the largest fractions of the total nutrients lost in Northern China, and the fractions of SOC, TN, and TP losses from the desert ecosystems all exceeded 50%. Following the desert ecosystems, the grassland ecosystems also had higher fractions of nutrients losses. The farmland ecosystems, which were the most severely impacted by human activities, contributed to less than 10% of the total nutrients losses.