A STUDY OF MODERN EROSION RATES IN THE COLOMBIAN ANDES, A NECESSARY STRATEGY TO STRENGTHENING THE GEOLOGY CURRICULA AND IMPLEMENTING LONG-TERM GEOMORPHOLOGY RESEARCH IN RURAL SCENARIOS

The Corporación para la Investigación y el Ecodesarrollo Regional (CIER) operates an educational project in 122 rural localities in the Antioquia department, Colombia. The project is aimed at fostering the emergence of local competences that will permit the construction of a locally-gestated plan for sustainable and harmonious rural development.

Considering that erosion is a critical environmental problem with evident detrimental social affects (e.g., one of the main causes of rural population migration to Colombian cities) we designed a parallel project to study land use and erosion dynamics in a largely deforested Andean region drained by the Magdalena and Cauca fluvial systems (highest sediment yield in the world). Our intention is to: 1) Educate local researchers by applying a newly-developed, comprehensive geoscience curriculum in rural study groups already administered by CIER. 2) Establish a GIS/RS-based system to document modern erosion so students/researchers can actively and systematically gather information and monitor the variables that exert the greatest control on erosion rates, i.e., topography, climate, vegetation, substrate erodibility, land use (raw GIS/RS data include SRTM full resolution DEMs, HYDRO/SIG-Universidad Nacional, Landsat 7 imagery, digitized geologic/pedologic maps). 3) Implement cost effective meteorological and fluvial stations as well as experimental plots in natural, agricultural, and degraded lands.

Our approach will allow us to monitor changes in land use/local hydrology and concomitant adjustments on erosion dynamics. It will also serve as the central theme to support a coherent and practical geology curriculum in the existing junior, high school, and university programs in rural Colombia (a crucial hotspot geologically, ecologically, environmentally, socially, etc). Through a doctoral investigation carried out by S. Restrepo in collaboration with CIER, long-term erosion rates are being reconstructed for the region, these data constitutes a benchmark against which anthropogenically enhanced erosion rates can be compared. Through this new collaborative endeavor we hope to contribute to the solution of a severe environmental and social crisis while significantly adding to our understanding of erosion dynamics as a central geologic process.