EMERALD (Early warning systeM for soil dEgRadation: a statistical physics
Approach to cLimate change aDaptation)
Principal investigators: Prof. John Goold and Dr. Francesca Pietracaprina
Climate change is an urgent challenge and impacts ecosystems, society, and economic activities. With EMERALD, we focus on the problem of loss of fertile soil (soil degradation), a process that is induced and accelerated by extreme weather and climate change and affects, among other sectors, agriculture, land use planning and food security. Current tools to monitor soil health for commercial purposes or policy-making are either limited in scale due to high cost, or insufficiently accurate due to the lack of underlying robust models.
Loss of fertile soil (soil degradation) is one of the most striking consequences of climate change. Specific causes include rising temperatures and reduction of moisture but also soil erosion processes such as removal of topsoil by heavy rainfalls and loss of protective vegetation cover. Desertification is a phase transition; the land degradation transition, and specifically its early onset, can be observed through a model of plant growth dynamics. As environmental stress increases, the growth geometry changes towards a clustered, fragmented pattern. This is an instance of the so-called percolation transition, a well-known statistical physics model.
The EMERALD Proof of Concept aims to test, further develop, and promote final users' uptake of a novel soil degradation evaluation founded in the statistical physics of disordered systems.
Project results
H.Yarahmadi, Y.Desille, J.Goold, F.Pietracaprina. Vegetation patterns and phenomenology from cellular automata models and satellite images. Preprint arXiv:2309.12232 [cond-mat.stat-mech] Read the paper
Data downloads
The qualitative degradation index developed in the above paper is available for areas in Spain, Ireland, France, Germany and Greece for the years 2014 to 2020. See the paper for full details.
Maps: NDVI CSV QGIS | LAI CSV QGIS
Classification data (see Sec. 4 of the paper for more info): NDVI | LAI
Country degradation maps sample
Perspectives
With this large-scale survey of soil degradation we aim to offer an effective climate change adaptation tool. Possible users are farmers, agricultural organisations and governments in land use planning on the medium and long term. The use of earth observation data enables a scalable solution to tackle the problem of land degradation globally.
This project has received funding from the European Research Council (Grant agreement No. 101069222)