Soil erosion is a major environmental threat to the sustainability and productive capacity of agriculture. During the last 40 years, nearly one-third of the world's arable land has been lost by erosion and continues to be lost at a rate of more than 10 million hectares per year. With the addition of a quarter of a million people each day, the world population's food demand is increasing at a ti...

Accurate assessment of soil loss is essential for sustainable agricultural production, 11 management and conservation planning, especially in productive rain-fed agro-ecosystems 12 and protected areas. The European Union considers soil as a non-renewable resource and 13 identifies that soil degradation has strong impacts on soil and water resources. In this work the 14 Revised Universal Soil Lo...

In Mediterranean environment intensive agricultural activities are often practiced in steep slopes, where sometimes climatic, geomorphologic and land use factors (e.g. the high rainfall intensity, the scarce vegetal coverage, especially on the occasion of the early rainfalls, the low organic matter content of soils, etc.) worsen the impacts of soil erosion. In such contexts agriculture may play...

Forestry operations can significantly alter hydrological and erosional processes in a catchment. In the course of developing timberland, a network of persistent roads and skid trails causing soil compaction is usually established. Hereby, the infiltration rate of the soil is distinctly reduced, which leads to the generation of overland flow—this may also cause soil erosion. In this study, a sma...

Much of the agricultural land in the Central Hills area of the Sichuan Basin is at risk from soil erosion by water. An investigation of rates and patterns of soil erosion on agricultural land near Yanting was undertaken using the caesium-137 technique. Erosion of the upper parts of sloping fields was found to be severe, with rates of the order of 20 to 50 t ha" year". However, infield depositio...

The revised universal soil loss equation (RUSLE), the sediment delivery distributed (SEDD) model, and ArcView GIS were used to estimate the impacts of no-till practice on soil erosion and sediment yield in Pataha Creek Watershed, a typical dryland agricultural watershed in southeastern Washington. The results showed that the average cell soil loss decreased from 11.09 to 3.10 t/ha yr for the wh...

Soil nutrient depletion is a major concern in terms of resource utilization and optimization of production in the middle hills of Nepal. Soil and nutrient losses from agricultural land is responsible for pollution of surface waters and this reduces the productive capacity of land. A field experiment was initiated in May 2001 on acidic sandy loam soil in Kavre district; Nepal to investigate the ...

In the Mediterranean region there is growing concern for the potential increase in erosion risk associated with climate change and increasing storm frequency. The central Ebro basin is the region facing the greatest problems of desertification in northern Spain and there is a need to assemble information on short-term erosion rates associated with individual storm events. The Be technique offer...

A better process understanding of how water erosion influences the redistribution of soil organic carbon (SOC) is sorely needed to unravel the role of soil erosion for the carbon (C) budget from local to global scales. The main objective of this study was to determine SOC redistribution and the complete C budget of a loess soil affected by water erosion. We measured fluxes of SOC, dissolved org...

In a headwater catchment in the Oregon Coast Range, we find that solid-phase mass losses due to chemical weathering are equivalent in the bedrock and the soil. However, the long-term rate of mass loss per unit volume of parent rock is greater in the soil than in the rock. We attribute this finding to the effects of biotic processes in the soil and to hydrologic conditions that maximize contact ...