Remote Sensing Derived Topsoil and Agricultural Economic Losses, Midwestern USA

Topography measures, including elevation (m), curvature (m-1), and slope (deg), were extracted over the entire study area from LiDAR-derived digital elevation models at a 4 m resolution acquired from 2003-2018. Within each of the 28 study sites, the SOCI and topographic curvature values were extracted from co-located pixels. Topsoil loss was estimated from the relationship between subsoil exposure and topography and averaged across each site.The relationship between topsoil loss and topographic curvature was used to up-scale and predict topsoil and economic losses at the county and state-levels across the entire 375,000 km2 study area.

The data have been used to demonstrate a robust and scalable method for estimating the magnitude of erosion in agricultural landscapes.