ERO · Process model
Soil erosion
RUSLE (R · K · LS · C · P) · v1.1.1 · 2026-07
Loess Plateau, China — classic erosion landscape, hill-by-hill detail
Long-term annual soil loss from the RUSLE model - rainfall, soil, slope, and land cover. Ice, rock, and open water are left unscored.
What ships
Surfaces — 0–1 susceptibility derived from annual erosion rate (t/ha/yr). Full-resolution (GSHHG-f) coastline: narrow coasts now scored where soil exists.
Every release: 0–1 score · 5-class band · per-pixel uncertainty · input-coverage mask · STAC item · methodology doc.
Inputs
ERA5 rainfall erosivity, SoilGrids K-factor, DEM slope-length, Copernicus Global Land Cover C-factor
Version history
What changed between releases — the same notes that ship with the data. Newest first.
v1.1.1
2026-07
current
- Full-resolution coastline (GSHHG-f). All four layers are re-clipped against the canonical GSHHG-f shoreline (~100 m native), so barrier islands and narrow coastal strips that previously read as NoData now carry a score.
- No-soil areas remain NoData. Glacier, permanent ice, bare rock, and open water return NoData rather than a fabricated value — erosion is undefined where there is no soil — consistent with prior vintages.
- Model unchanged. Susceptibility, classification, uncertainty, and coverage values match v1.1 across scored land; a land-mask refresh, not a model revision.
- Product footprint is 84°N–60°S; Antarctica excluded by standard.
v1.1
2026-04
- Compact uint16 encoding. The surfaces were re-encoded from float32 to compact integer COGs with a documented scale (physical = raw × scale, nodata 65535) — smaller and self-describing, with no loss of precision at the delivered resolution. Method and values are unchanged from v1.0.
v1.0
2026-04
- Initial release — RUSLE-based annual soil loss. Susceptibility derived from the Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation (R · K · LS · C · P): ERA5 rainfall erosivity, SoilGrids soil erodibility (K-factor), a DEM-derived slope-length factor, and a Copernicus Global Land Cover cover factor. The annual soil-loss rate (t/ha/yr) is ranked to a 0–1 percentile scale, with a five-class map keyed to FAO erosion severity (Tolerable → Very High), plus per-pixel uncertainty (propagated from the RUSLE input uncertainties) and coverage.
- Ice, rock, and open water are left unscored. Erosion is undefined where there is no soil, so those surfaces return nodata by design rather than a fabricated value.
Other hazards
LandslideAvalancheWildfireEarthquakeWindstormExtreme heatExtreme coldFrost / freezeLightningHurricaneDrought