Humans have substantially altered soil and landscape patterns and properties due to agricultural use, with severe impacts on biodiversity, carbon sequestration and food security. These impacts are difficult to quantify, because we lack data on long-term changes in soils in natural and agricultural settings and available simulation methods are not suitable for reliably predicting future development of soils under projected changes in climate and land management. To help overcome these challenges, we developed the HydroLorica soil–landscape evolution model that simulates soil development by explicitly modeling the spatial water balance as a driver of soil- and landscape-forming processes. We simulated 14 500 years of soil formation under natural conditions for three scenarios of different rainfall inputs. For each scenario we added a 500-year period of intensive agricultural land use, where we introduced tillage erosion and changed vegetation type. Our results show substantial differences between natural soil patterns under different rainfall input. With higher rainfall, soil patterns become more heterogeneous due to increased tree throw and water erosion. Agricultural patterns differ substantially from the natural patterns, with higher variation of soil properties over larger distances and larger correlations with terrain position. In the natural system, rainfall is the dominant factor influencing soil variation, while for agricultural soil patterns landform explains most of the variation simulated. The cultivation of soils thus changed the dominant factors and processes influencing soil formation and thereby also increased predictability of soil patterns. Our study highlights the potential of soil–landscape evolution modeling for simulating past and future developments of soil and landscape patterns. Our results confirm that humans have become the dominant soil-forming factor in agricultural landscapes.

中文翻译：

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模拟土壤和景观的演变 降雨和土地利用变化对土壤和景观格局的影响

由于农业的使用，人类大大改变了土壤和景观的格局和特性，对生物多样性，碳固存和粮食安全产生了严重影响。这些影响难以量化，因为我们缺乏有关自然和农业环境中土壤长期变化的数据，并且可用的模拟方法不适合可靠地预测气候和土地管理预计变化下土壤的未来发展。为了帮助克服这些挑战，我们开发了HydroLorica土壤景观演化模型，该模型通过显式建模空间水平衡作为土壤和景观形成过程的驱动力来模拟土壤发育。我们模拟了三种条件下不同降雨输入的自然条件下14？500年的土壤形成。对于每种情况，我们都增加了500年的集约化农业土地使用期，其中引入了耕作侵蚀和改变了植被类型。我们的结果表明，在不同的降雨输入下，天然土壤模式之间存在很大差异。随着降雨的增加，由于树木投掷和水蚀增加，土壤模式变得更加不均匀。农业模式与自然模式大不相同，在更大的距离上土壤特性变化更大，并且与地形位置的相关性更大。在自然系统中，降雨是影响土壤变化的主要因素，而对于农业土壤模式，地形解释了大多数模拟变化。因此，土壤耕种改变了影响土壤形成的主要因素和过程，从而也增加了土壤模式的可预测性。我们的研究强调了土壤–景观演化模型在模拟过去和未来土壤和景观格局发展中的潜力。我们的结果证实，人类已成为农业景观中主要的土壤形成因素。