Is It Possible to Achieve Sustainable Land Management on Land Affected by Erosion? Issues of Modeling Variants

Abstract

Despite the large number of different antierosion practices used in the country, the dynamics of the areas of eroded lands remains multidirectional and unstable. The goal of the work was to propose a methodological approach for semantic modeling of sustainable land management with a focus on antierosion measures, the methods for such modeling and land management in the areas prone to soil erosion in order to maintain and restore degraded lands. A variety of erosion control techniques, methods, approaches, technologies and activities described in different sources, including databases on best practices, educational and scientific literature serves as objects of the study. The study was based on the integration of several working hypotheses and approaches proposed by the authors in earlier publications. The methodological basis of these approaches is the concept of land degradation neutrality (LDN) and the principles for assessing the “sustainability” of environmental management based on it. Using the example of several sites, methods for semantic modeling of the sustainability of antierosion land management are considered. These methods are based on assessing the achievement of LDN using so-called “good” practices. For the assessment, the following parameters of the model were applied: “natural potential” (reflecting resource potential, adaptive potential and the ability to self-recovery of land), “expanded potential” (reflecting human improvements in natural potential and the sufficiency of socioeconomic conditions); “actual adverse impacts,” including natural processes and phenomena and those caused by human impact; and “potential adverse impacts,” including natural and anthropogenic risks. Model parameters can be combined in the required combination and reflect different modeling tasks in order to determine the adequacy of erosion control practices, including general approaches and techniques for regional models, methods and technologies for subregional and local ones, and specific activities and measures for local models implemented for individual land plots and farms. The proposed method for visualizing models, based on the construction of radar diagrams, is a flexible solution that provides opportunity to consider the sufficiency of practices, combine them into groups, and also generalize sustainability parameters depending on the goals of modeling.