ABSTRACT
Soil erosion research is a capital-intensive, time-consuming exercise. Large areas of the earth are affected by accelerated erosion by water and wind. Data reliability is one of the serious problems in soil erosion research. Equally ruinous are the adverse effects of wind erosion. Although wind erosion is less than water erosion on a world scale, the problem is severe in many semiarid and arid regions. There is an urgent need for standardizing methodologies to increase the reliability and accuracy of data on soil erosion. Extrapolations based on limited data and to regions outside the ecological limits in which experiments were conducted are often misleading. There continues to be a lack of standard methods to measure and quantify soil erosion and its impact on productivity and environment. Soil erosion is among the most critical environmental hazards of modern times. Vast areas of land now being cultivated may be rendered unproductive or at least economically unproductive if erosion continues unabated.
