Assessing of Soil Erosion Risk Through Geoinformation Sciences and Remote Sensing -- A Review

During past decades a marked manifestation of widespread erosion phenomena was studied worldwide. Global conservation community has launched campaigns at local, regional and continental level in developing countries for preservation of soil resources in order not only to stop or mitigate human impact on nature but also to improve life in rural areas introducing new approaches for soil cultivation. After the adoption of Sustainable Development Goals of UNs and launching several world initiatives such as the Land Degradation Neutrality (LDN) the world came to realize the very importance of the soil resources on which the biosphere relies for its existence. The main goal of the chapter is to review different types and structures erosion models as well as their applications. Several methods using spatial analysis capabilities of geographic information systems (GIS) are in operation for soil erosion risk assessment, such as Universal Soil Loss Equation (USLE), Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation (RUSLE) in operation worldwide and in the USA and MESALES model. These and more models are being discussed in the present work alongside more experimental models and methods for assessing soil erosion risk such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine and Deep Learning, etc. At the end of this work, a prospectus for the future development of soil erosion risk assessment is drawn.

Challenges and Solutions for Utilizing Earth Observations in the "Big Data" era

The ever-growing need of data preservation and their systematic analysis contributing to sustainable development of the society spurred in the past decade,numerous Big Data projects and initiatives are focusing on the Earth Observation (EO). The number of Big Data EO applications has grown extremely worldwide almost simultaneously with other scientific and technological areas of the human knowledge due to the revolutionary technological progress in the space and information technology sciences. The substantial contribution to this development are the space programs of the renowned space agencies, such as NASA, ESA,Roskosmos, JAXA, DLR, INPE, ISRO, CNES etc. A snap-shot of the current Big Data sets from available satellite missions covering the Bulgarian territory is also presented. This short overview of the geoscience Big Data collection with a focus on EO will emphasize to the multiple Vs of EO in order to provide a snapshot on the current state-of-the-art in EO data preservation and manipulation. Main modern approaches for compressing, clustering and modelling EO in the geoinformation science for Big Data analysis, interpretation and visualization for a variety of applications are outlined. Special attention is paid to the contemporary EO data modelling and visualization systems.