Modelled erosional impacts on soil and freshwater nitrogen and phosphorus dynamics in Lake Victoria’s catchment area, 2000-2022

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Environmental Information Data Centre
Last updated:
19 November 2025
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Summary

This dataset presents model predictions of soil erosion impacts on land and freshwater systems in the Lake Victoria Basin. These impacts include: (1) soil nutrient balances as a function of nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) loads to the land surface from fertiliser, manure and atmospheric deposition, minus rates of nutrient loss via soil erosion; and (2) total sediment and nutrient exports to water aggregated per sub-catchment (t/yr), which combines nutrients lost in surface runoff and subsurface flows with additional losses associated with erosion of existing soil nutrient stocks. These data are particularly useful for better understanding terrestrial N and P dynamics, and should provide valuable data for analysis of soil fertility, food security and water quality. These data were generated for each year (2000, 2005, 2010, 2015 & 2022) using two models from the InVEST ecosystem services platform: the Nutrient Delivery Ratio (NDR) and Sediment Delivery Ratio (SDR) models. Each of these models relies on a set of simple empirical functions, which has the advantage of requiring few model inputs that are easy to provide and allow for rapid modelling of large spatial areas, but come with the disadvantage of missing potentially important processes. For example, the SDR model only considers soil erosion via rills and sheetwash; it does not capture gullies, landslides or river channel change. Additionally, it was not possible to calibrate either model due to a scarcity of observational data. However, the models do produce generally expected patterns of sediment and nutrient dynamics. Hence, the outputs should still be useful for identifying areas of relatively high and low values and for assessing relative changes over time. The outputs themselves consist of raster gridded maps at 90 x 90 metre resolution, as well as vector polygons representing sub-catchments. The sub-catchments aggregate the total sediment, N and P exports from land to water for all grid cells present within each sub-catchment's boundary. All maps cover the full catchment area (196,883 sq. km excluding the lake itself) of the Lake Victoria Basin. Full details about this dataset can be found at https://doi.org/10.5285/02977a5d-00a0-44f8-baee-d2e0eecb5df0

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Added to data.gov.uk
2025-11-13
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If you reuse this data, you should cite: Sharps, K., Feeney, C., Bisht, T., Thomas, A., May, L. (2025). Modelled erosional impacts on soil and freshwater nitrogen and phosphorus dynamics in Lake Victoria’s catchment area, 2000-2022. NERC EDS Environmental Information Data Centre https://doi.org/10.5285/02977a5d-00a0-44f8-baee-d2e0eecb5df0
Harvest GUID
02977a5d-00a0-44f8-baee-d2e0eecb5df0
Extent
Latitude: 1.28° to °
Longitude: 29.421° to 35.89°
Spatial reference system
Dataset reference date
2025-08-12 (publication)
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ISO 19139 resource type
dataset
Metadata language
eng
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