Large areas in Bavaria, but also worldwide, where fertile soils are intensively used for agriculture, are severely affected by soil erosion. Under climate change, these major soil threat is expected to be amplified due to increasing heavy rainfall events and increasing and intensifying droughts. While the effectiveness of individual soil and water conservation measures and cultivation methods has already been extensively studied, there are still substantial knowledge gaps regarding the interaction between different measures, especially their effects on surface runoff generation. Furthermore, changing climatic conditions and the intended reduction in herbicides pose new challenges to classical erosion control measures, making it more difficult to balance the interests of food production, energy generation and environmental or resource protection.

In Ruhstorf (about 120 km east of Munich) the LfL is establishing a unique long-term experimental site to study the physical, biogeochemical, social and economic factors that drive erosion: The EARL - Erosion and Runoff Laboratory. Soil and water conservation measures under different new cultivation methods (variety selection, plant protection and fertilization regimes, tillage methods, robotics and precision farming) and different crop rotations will be analysed for at least 10 years. A specific focus will be the resilience of different cultivation methods and crop rotations against extreme weather conditions. Therefore, fourteen large-scale plots (length 150 m; width 6 m) for continuous measurements and 28 mid-scale plots (length 50 m, width 6 m) for individual experiments will be established within an area of about 4 ha located along a slope of about 7%.

To upscale first results from the EARL project and analyse the large-scale changes in erosion potential in southern Germany (Bavaria) due to climate and agricultural management changes, the Water and Soil Resources Research Group will work on multi-process erosion modelling tool to regionalise future results from the long-term experiments. Water and tillage erosion will be simulated using a conceptual model, which will be tested using multiscale data. A vital aspect of this research is the comparison with a large-scale daily erosion classification currently being developed by the working group using an AI big data approach. This comparison is expected to yield new, innovative insights into erosion modelling and the uncertainties associated with large-scale erosion model outputs. This, in general, should result in a new operational approach for erosion modelling in agricultural landscapes in Bavaria.