A large proportion of the soil loss is generally produced by a small number of large erosive events; these events are primarily responsible for the time compression of geomorphic processes. This issue, however, has received little attention in subtropical humid karst areas where extreme rainfall events frequently occur and soil erosion is relatively severe. The objective of this study was to examine the contributions of the largest daily erosive events to the annual sediment yield and to investigate whether these contributions depend on flow variability, catchment size, and karst coverage in 40 selected karst catchments. The time series data of the largest daily erosive events at each catchment were ranked by magnitude, and the percentage of the sediment yield produced by the n‐largest erosive events was calculated. The results indicated that a few large erosive events governed the annual sediment yield. Specifically, the 5‐largest erosive events produced, on average, 56% of the annual sediment yield, while the 10‐ and 25‐largest erosive events contributed 69% and 83% of the annual sediment yield, respectively. A catchment with a high flow variability generally had a great percentage of the sediment yield produced by largest events. The sediment produced by n‐largest erosive events (%) significantly decreased by catchment size as a power function and thus were scale dependent, while the karst coverage had no significant effect on these contributions. This study is helpful to effectively controlling sediment delivery and provides a more in‐depth understanding of the soil erosion processes in subtropical humid karst regions.

中文翻译：

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喀斯特流域最大的侵蚀事件对沉积物产量的贡献

土壤流失的很大一部分通常是由少量的大型侵蚀事件造成的；这些事件主要负责地貌过程的时间压缩。然而，在亚热带湿润喀斯特地区很少发生该问题，那里经常发生极端降雨事件，土壤侵蚀相对较严重。这项研究的目的是检查最大的日常侵蚀事件对年沉积物产量的贡献，并调查这些贡献是否取决于流量变化，流域规模和40个选定的喀斯特流域的喀斯特覆盖率。每个流域每天最大侵蚀事件的时间序列数据按大小排序，n产生的沉积物产量百分比-计算了最大的侵蚀事件。结果表明，一些大的侵蚀事件决定了年沉积物的产量。具体而言，最大的5个侵蚀事件平均产生了每年的沉积物产量的56％，而最大的10和25个侵蚀事件分别贡献了每年的沉积物产量的69％和83％。流量变化大的流域通常占最大事件产生的沉积物产量的很大一部分。n产生的沉积物最大的侵蚀事件（％）以汇水面积大小作为幂函数而显着降低，因此与规模有关，而岩溶覆盖度对这些贡献没有显着影响。这项研究有助于有效控制沉积物的输送，并提供对亚热带湿润喀斯特地区土壤侵蚀过程的更深入的了解。