Wind Erosion in Western Queensland Australia

Chapter 8 – Conclusionsmultiple assessments of the model performance across scales and under a range ofclimatic conditions (i.e. during drought and periods of above average rainfall).8.5 Future Research PrioritiesThis thesis has identified several areas that require future research. These relate to thelimitations of this research, understanding land erodibility in Australia, and to thedevelopment of models to assess spatial and temporal changes in soil and land erodibility ingeneral. They include:1. More studies are required to quantify relationships between factors controlling soilerodibility (aggregation and surface crusting), soil physical properties, climatic factorsand land management. In particular, research is required at high temporal resolutions (e.g.days) to elucidate the response of soils to individual rainfall events and antecedentclimate and management conditions. This research is essential for developing functionalsoil erodibility models, which are lacking from most process-based wind erosion modelstoday. A component of this research should focus on how to integrate new soil erodibilitymodels into current wind erosion and land erodibility modelling systems. For example,the output of soil erodibility models should be physical parameters that can be input intoschemes that compute the threshold friction velocity for sediment mobilisation.2. More attention needs to be given to how the effects of heterogeneous surface roughnesscan be incorporated into wind erosion and land erodibility models. While statisticalmethods have been developed to account for sub-grid scale heterogeneity in vegetationcover (Raupach and Lu, 2004), further research is required to quantify surface roughnesseffects at scales relevant to the field distribution of roughness elements (e.g. Okin, 2008).This will be facilitated by developing methods that utilise remote sensing technologies tomap the distribution of vegetation cover at moderate to high spatial resolutions (e.g.pixels < 30 x 30 m). While this may not currently be feasible for dynamic herbaceouscover, estimates of the distribution of tree cover in rangeland environments (which variesover longer time scales) would significantly improve model assessments of potential winderosion.200