Author(s): Luis R. Hernandez-Angulo; Pilar Garcia-Navarro; Sergio Martinez-Aranda
Linked Author(s): Pilar García-Navarro
Keywords: High performance computation; Physically based modelling; Post-fire soil erosion; Remote sensing
Abstract: Soil erosion significantly affects water quality and aquatic ecosystems, making its accurate assessment essential for effective land management. Modelling is widely used for this purpose, although its reliability is constrained by uncertainties in model structure, parameterisation, and calibration, particularly in post-fire environments where vegetation loss and altered soil properties increase erosion susceptibility. The Las Torcas Basin (Aragón, eastern Spain), fully impacted by a wildfire in July 2022, was selected as the study area. Soil erosion was estimated using SERGHEI-EFHERA, a distributed, physically based model based on two-dimensional shallow water equations, including multi-grain sediment transport and soil surface evolution. Input data comprised a 2 m resolution DTM, land use data for Manning’s coefficients and a land conservation factor (LU; 1–10), FCOVER derived from Sentinel-2 imagery (2020–2023), and soil properties from the European Soil Database v2.0. This study aims to evaluate soil erosion in a post-fire scenario through the application of a physically based model in Spain.
Year: 2026