Soil protection shock (soil & sediment retention)

Source: GLOBIO-ES (EBV cube) Year: 2015 baseline → 2035 / 2050 / 2080 Category: Scenario · Ecosystem service (ES-direct, Tier-2) Coverage: Global Format: Raster grid (COG) Used in risk analysis: Yes — supplies the Soil and sediment retention service shock in the Nature Stress Test; not used in present-day materiality scoring.

What it shows

This layer family projects how the landscape's capacity to hold soil in place — controlling erosion and retaining sediment before it reaches a watercourse — is expected to change under climate-and-land-use scenarios, relative to a 2015 baseline.

It is an ES-direct (Tier-2) layer: it carries an ecosystem service shock, not an ecosystem component shock. When it resolves for the requested scenario and horizon, the Nature Stress Test reads the Soil and sediment retention degradation straight from the layer and bypasses the ENCORE projection from natural assets (which would otherwise route it through the Soils component).

Note the naming: the layer is called Soil protection, and the ENCORE ecosystem service it feeds is Soil and sediment retention. They are the same thing — the service name is what appears in the stress-test explorer.

How it is built

GLOBIO-ES derives the erosion-control / sediment-retention capacity of each cell from land use and vegetation cover in the EBV (Essential Biodiversity Variable) cube. The shock is the relative change in that capacity (%) versus the 2015 baseline, with negative = service loss.

Horizon provenance — read this before using 2035 or 2080. GLOBIO-ES supplies a single future slice, at 2050. The 2035 and 2080 layers are linearly scaled off the 2015 baseline — the 2050 shock multiplied by (horizon − 2015) / 35 and clamped to range — so they assume a constant rate of degradation and carry no independent model information. Read them as a trajectory, not as a projection.

Scenario forcing. The pessimistic member is driven by SSP3-RCP6.0, the forcing GLOBIO-ES publishes for the regional-rivalry pathway, whereas the natural-asset layers use SSP3-RCP7.0 and the application labels the scenario SSP3-7.0 throughout.

How to read it

Values are the projected change in soil- and sediment-retention capacity, in percent versus 2015. More negative = greater projected loss of soil protection at that location; values near zero indicate stability; positive values indicate projected recovery.

Because this service is often the dominant one under the Max aggregation used in the stress test, a site's whole projected loss can end up attributed to Soil and sediment retention. Switch the explorer to the Sum aggregation, or group by ecosystem component, to see the other services behind it.

Class thresholds

The underlying quantity is a change-of-condition flux: relative change in erosion-control / sediment-retention capacity, in % vs the 2015 baseline. Rendered as a continuous symlog diverging gradient, not discrete risk classes:

Proximity flag. A cell is flagged as a high Soil shock zone on the Enabling services dimension when the shock falls below −30 %. The −30 % break and the symmetric gradient endpoints are in-house choices, not published thresholds.

Source

GLOBIO-ES (PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency) — ecosystem-service extension of the GLOBIO model, distributed as an EBV cube.

Comparison with the WWF Risk Filter Suite

This is a forward-looking, horizon-resolved scenario layer and has no equivalent in the WWF Risk Filter Suite, which publishes present-day indicators only. Treat it as a Darwin extension.

Legend

Symbolised field: Soil & sediment retention shock (%)

Generated from darwin/layers/layer-soil-protection-shock-ssp{1,3}-{2035,2050,2080}.toml (develop).