Wind Erosion Impacts on Drylands Soils.

Wind erosion is a significant aeolian process that produces many effects on the soils and landscapes in dryland systems, comprising almost forty percent of the Earth’s land surface.  Wind erosion often occurs when coarse-textured soils are bare, loose, dry and subjected to erosive winds. Although wind erosion occurs in almost all climatic regions, it is a dominant process in arid and semi-arid regions where it impacts soil genesis, mineralogy, physical and biogeochemical properties and landscape evolution.  Soil characteristics have a great impact on wind erodibility of soils. For example, fine and very fine sandy soils produce little aggregation and are much more wind-erodible than soils with more clay that readily form non-erodible aggregates. The effects of wind erosion occur at the field, landscape, regional, and global scales. Loss of nutrients, water holding capacity and physical abrasion affects crop productivity at the field scale. At the landscape and regional scales, soil redistribution causes geomorphic modification of the landscape to produce features such as dunes of various descriptions and modifications of the surface texture. In addition, wind erosion at the landscape and regional scale causes changes in biogeochemical cycles affecting the composition, productivity and spatial patterns of vegetation that subsequently affects soil properties. Dust emitted during wind erosion events affects nearby and distant ecosystems and soils. Changes in loess depth and surface texture particle size with proximity to the sediment source have been widely reported. Dust entrainment and transport at the regional scale may produce atmospheric dust that impacts soils globally.