Development and application of soil producitivty indices for Central America: SPIES (Soil Productivity Indices and their Erosion Sensitivity).

Modelling of interactions between soil erosion and soil productivity in a GIS, practical application in Costa Rica, Nicaragua and Mexico. Short title: SPIES - Soil Productivity Indexes of Central America and their Erosion Sensitivity. The project is to develop a methodology to estimate the relationship between soil erosion and soil productivity for Central American conditions. Based on this knowledge, an extended Productivity-Index-model will be linked to the European Soil Erosion Model (EUROSEM), which first will be validated under conditions of Central America. Once established, the combination of the extended Productivity-Index-model - EUROSEM (SPIES) will serve as tool to predict sustainability of agricultural land use using different environmental scenarios. To provide usefull tools for decision makers, SPIES, combined with a GIS will be applied on catchment scale. The results of this approach will also be supported by the development of maps and animation techniques, in order to assess the time horizon, in which a current land use can be performed at a certain productivity level.