ABSTRACT
A review of landform change over the past millennium in central Europe (Bork 1988) has shown that, with increasing anthropogenic use of the soil, processes of wind and water erosion have increased in intensity and have substantially affected landform change during this period. Soil erosion research has thus become an important field of both historic-genetic and applied geomorphological research. Because of the many parameters involved, early efforts were made to develop mathematical models to describe the interaction of individual factors governing erosion. The first models were purely empirical, the best known being USLE (Wischmeier & Smith 1965). However, the application potential of purely empirical models is very limited. As well as the problem of non-transferability, it is mainly the low spatial and temporal resolution and the neglect of deposition processes that limit the use of empirical models, particularly USLE. For this reason, efforts have been made to develop physically based erosion models. One such physically based model is EROSION 2D (Schmidt 1991a). This model describes the detachment, transport and deposition of soil particles, including the resulting changes in slope geometry. Possible applications of EROSION 2D range from purely practical questions-such as planning and calculating soil protection measures (Schmidt 1991b)— to simulating long-term landform change. In addition, the theoretical approach permits
the user to view the influence of individual parameters in isolation (sensitivity analyses), thus opening up new possibilities of understanding the complex processes involved.
