To preserve the quality of surface water, official French regulations require farmers to keep a minimum acreage of grassland, especially bordering rivers. These agro-environmental measures do not account for the circulation of water within the catchment. This paper examines whether it is possible to design with the farmers agri-environmental measures at field and catchment scale to prevent soil...

Terraced systems currently represent an indubitable added value for Tuscany, as well as for other Italian regions and for several Mediterranean countries. This value goes beyond their original function of hosting new areas for cultivation. The hydrological functions performed by these systems, including control of erosion, stabilisation of the slopes, prolongation of runoff times and the possib...

In recent years growing human pressure on agricultural land in the north of the Lao PDR has led to accelerated degradation processes along hillslopes, and higher sediment delivery rates to streams. Furthermore, high demand from urban centres is attracting farmers to cultivate vegetables in riparian areas. These land-use changes may have negative affects on stream water quality. The aims of this...

Available water resources for agricultural irrigation have decreased worldwide in recent decades, prompting advances in water saving methods. In this study, soil water regime and water balance in a transplanted rice field with reduced irrigation (multiple shallow depth irrigations) in the Taihu Lake Basin of East China were observed and then evaluated using Hydrus-1D model during two consecutiv...

Phosphorus losses by surface runoff from agricultural lands have been of public concern due to increasing P contamination to surface waters. Five representative commercial citrus groves (C1–C5) located in South Florida were studied to evaluate the relationships between P fractions in soils, surface runoff P, and soil phosphatase activity. A modified Hedley P sequential fractionation procedure w...

Some of the highest losses of nitrate to surface waters come from drained agricultural land. Given previous this article studied for Belgian farming conditions (i) the effect of subsurface drainage density on nitrate losses and (ii) the economics of nitrate emissions, using the nitrogen version of DRAINMOD (Brevé et al., 1997 a and b). DRAINMOD (Skaggs, 1997) was used to simulate the performanc...