Search results for " soil conservation"
showing 8 items of 8 documents
SOILPRO: a LIFE+ project implementing soil monitoring and protection together with regional stakeholders of Sicily and Peloponnese.
2011
According to the Thematic Strategy for Soil Protection, the LIFE+ ENV/IT/00428 SOILPRO project (http://www.soilpro.eu) has the overall objective of slowing down the progress of soil degradation in EU Member States, and supporting local and regional authorities (LRAs) in the identification and monitoring of risk areas. The monitoring of the on-going soil degradation processes and the evaluation of different protection measures are realized through a web-based application (SMS – Soil Monitoring System), developed according to data and knowledge obtained from the different project partners. The SMS was initially applied on the whole Sicily (Italy) and Peloponnese (Greece) regions and then test…
Soil, pasture and animal products quality
2013
The management of pasture, through the use of appropriate stocking rates and grazing systems, influences the feeding behaviour of the animals. The impact of animal behaviour on vegetation can be of great importance for the sustainability of pastures and mantaining their biodiversity. Indeed, a different response in terms of quality of animal products is mediated by the ability of animals to concentrate or transform grass components, according to the characteristics of the soil. The herbage ingested by animals provides them with compounds with aromatic characteristics, such as terpenes, and with functional properties beneficial for human health, such as carotenoids, vitamins, polyphenols and…
Effective Practices in Mitigating Soil Erosion from Fields
2017
Soil erosion by water is a natural process that cannot be avoided. Soil erosion depends on many factors, and a distinction should be made between humanly unchangeable (e.g., rainfall) and modifiable (e.g., length of the field) soil erosion factors. Soil erosion has both on-site and off-site effects. Soil conservation tries to combine modifiable factors so as to maintain erosion in an area of interest to an acceptable level. Strategies to control soil erosion have to be adapted to the desired land use. Knowledge of soil loss tolerance, T, i.e., the maximum admissible erosion from a given field, allows technicians or farmers to establish whether soil conservation practices need to be applied …
Soil water erosion on Mediterranean vineyards: A review
2016
Soil water erosion on cultivated lands represents a severe threat to soil resources in the world, and especially in Mediterranean areas, due to their topographic, edaphic and climatic conditions. Among the cultivated lands, vineyards deserve a particular attention because, aside representing one of the most important crops in terms of income and employment, they also have proven to be the form of agricultural use that causes one of the highest soil losses. Although the topic of soil water erosion on vineyards has been studied, it still raises uncertainties, due to the high variability of procedures for data acquisition, which consists into different scales of analysis and measurement method…
An assessment of the global impact of 21st century land use change on soil erosion
2017
Human activity and related land use change are the primary cause of accelerated soil erosion, which has substantial implications for nutrient and carbon cycling, land productivity and in turn, worldwide socio-economic conditions. Here we present an unprecedentedly high resolution (250 × 250 m) global potential soil erosion model, using a combination of remote sensing, GIS modelling and census data. We challenge the previous annual soil erosion reference values as our estimate, of 35.9 Pg yr−1 of soil eroded in 2012, is at least two times lower. Moreover, we estimate the spatial and temporal effects of land use change between 2001 and 2012 and the potential offset of the global application o…
Using plot soil loss distribution for soil conservation design
2011
Abstract Soil conservation design is generally based on the estimation of average annual soil loss but it should be developed taking into account storms of a given return period. However, use of frequency analysis in soil erosion studies is relatively limited. In this paper, an investigation on statistical distribution of soil loss measurements was firstly carried out using a relatively high number of simultaneously operating plots of different lengths, λ (11, 22, 33 and 44 m) at the experimental station of Sparacia (southern Italy). Using a simple normalization technique, the analysis showed that the probability distribution of the normalized soil loss is independent of both the scale leng…
Land set-up systems in Italy: A long tradition of soil and water conservation sewed up to a variety of pedo-climatic environments
2020
Land set-up systems in Italy were and, in a few cases, still are integral parts of agricultural landscapes. The soils of Italy mirror a wide variety of climates and morphologies and derive from a great diversity of parent materials influenced by different soil temperature and moisture regimes. Furthermore, their development was influenced by several anthropogenic activities over time including land settings. Land set-up systems have been widely used throughout the Italian soilscape to regulate surface and underground water and to improve the physical soil features in a way that ensures mixed herbaceous and tree-crops cultivation. In recent times, new technologies have been introduced in agr…
Using the ARP-03 for high-resolution mapping of calcic horizons
2013
A b s t r a c t. The aim of this work is to present a fast and cheap method for high-resolution mapping of calcic horizons in vineyards based on geoelectrical proximal sensing. The study area, 45 ha located in southern Sicily (Italy), was characterized by an old, partially dismantled marine terrace and soils with a calcic horizon at different depths. The geoelectrical investigation consisted of a survey of the soil electrical resistivity recorded with the Automatic Resistivity Profiling-03 sensor. The electrical resistivity values at three pseudo-depths, 0-50, 0-100 and 0-170 cm, were spatialized by means of ordinary kriging. A principal component analysis of the three electrical resistivit…