Search results for " SOIL"

Elaborazione e validazione di modelli dell’impatto antropico e dei cambiamenti climatici sulle qualità dei suoli in Sicilia, con particolare attenzio…

Il declino della sostanza organica e l’erosione idrica sono due fattori di rischio di degrado del suolo fra i più diffusi in Sicilia. In che misura è possibile contrastarli modificando le attività antropiche ed in particolare quelle in ambito agricolo? Lo scopo della presente ricerca di dottorato è stato quello di mettere a punto dei modelli che permettessero di spiegare le relazioni esistenti fra le azioni dell’uomo in ambito agricolo con la sostanza organica e con l’erosione idrica nei suoli siciliani, tenendo conto anche del clima. Le due indagini sono state svolte separatamente, in parallelo, in aree agricole della Sicilia occidentale per la sostanza organica, sull’intero territorio sic…

Soil aggregates, organic matter turnover and carbon balance in a Mediterranean eroded vineyard

2014

The carbon cycle is being affected by the human impacts (Novara et al., 2011; Yan-Gui et al., 2013), and one of those is the intensification in the soil erosion in agriculture land (Cerdà et al., 2009; García Orenes et al., 2009). Vineyards also are affected by the human activities (Fernández Calviño, 2012). Vineyards in Sicily are cultivated on 110.000 ha, 10% of which on >10% slope. Deficiencies of soil organic matter are typical of the semi arid Mediterranean environment especially where traditional intensive cropping practices are adopted (Novara et al., 2012; 2013). These practices in vineyards could lead soil to intensive erosion processes (Novara et al., 2011). The fate of SOC under …

Soil erosion and carbon budget in Mediterranean vineyards

2016

Vineyards of Mediterranean regions are characterized by low organic matter level and high sediment and nutrient erosion rates, which are the main causes of soil degradation and low sustainability of vine production. Alternative soil management - cover crops, green manure of prune residues, buffer strip- has widely applied as soil management practices to reduce soil degradation processes. However, the effectiveness of innovative soil management should be evaluated in relation to climatic and soil conditions. Many studies have been carried out in Sicilian vineyards in order to improve the sustainability with particular attention to: reduction of erosion, increase of soil organic matter, manag…

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 …

Supporting USLE-MM reliability by analyzing soil loss measurement errors

2017

Sampling the collected suspension in a storage tank is a common procedure to obtain soil loss data. A calibration curve of the tank has to be used to obtain actual concentration values from those measured by sampling. However, literature suggests that using a tank calibration curve was not a common procedure in the past. For the clay soil of the Sparacia (Italy) experimental station, this investigation aimed to establish a link between the relative performances of the USLE-M and USLE-MM models, usable to predict plot soil loss at the event temporal scale, and soil loss measurement errors. Using all available soil loss data, lower soil loss prediction errors were obtained with the USLE-MM (e…

USLE-based models: perspectives and limitations in soil erosion modelling

2020

Water soil erosion is a process of detachment and transport of soil particles due to rainfall and runoff and causes the landform modeling on earthʹs surface. The acceleration of soil erosion process through anthropogenic perturbation has severe impacts on soil which becomes qualitatively poor for crop establishment and growth. Planning soil conservation strategies requires prediction technologies of soil loss over a long‐time period. The Universal Soil Loss Equation (USLE), and its revised versions, are widely tested and applied in different environments throughout the world. At present, the USLE continues to be the most applied model for estimating soil loss and still represents the best c…

No-Till Soil Organic Carbon Sequestration Patterns as Affected by Climate and Soil Erosion in the Arable Land of Mediterranean Europe

2022

No-tillage (NT) has been considered an agronomic tool to sequester soil organic carbon (SOC) and match the 4p1000 initiative requirements of conservative soil management. Recently, some doubts have emerged about the NT effect on SOC sequestration, often because observations and experimental data vary widely depending on climate and geographic characteristics. Therefore, a suitable SOC accounting method is needed that considers climate and morphology interactions. In this study, the yearly ratio between SOC in NT and conventional tillage (CT) (RRNT/CT) collected in a previous study for flat (96 samples) and sloping (44 samples) paired sites was used to map the overestimation of SOC sequestra…

Sediment delivery processes and chemical transport in a small forested basin

2005

Recent reaserch has directed attention to the properties of the eroded material because of its influence in deposition phenomena and in carrying capacity of pollutant materials

Testing the Universal Soil Loss Equation-MB equation in plots in Central and South Italy

2019

Planning soil conservation strategies requires predictive techniques at event scale because a large percentage of soil loss over a long-time period is due to relatively few large storms. Considering runoff is expected to improve soil loss predictions and allows relation of the process-oriented approach with the empirical one, furthermore, the effects of detachment and transport on soil erosion processes can be distinguished by a runoff component. In this paper, the empirical model USLE-MB (USLE-M based), including a rainfall-runoff erosivity factor in which the event rainfall erosivity index EI30 of the Universal Soil Loss Equation (USLE) multiplies the runoff coefficient QR raised to an ex…

Role of land set-up systems on soil (physicochemical) conditions

2020

Land reclamation and drainage networks represent one of the most ancient human modifications of the Italian soilscape, where tailored land set-up systems were developed in agro- and forestecosystems in three millennia of man’s activity. Most of once manually maintained land settings are currently scarcely working or even disappeared because of the cost needed for their maintenance and the advent of mechanization that have simplified the field organization. The scarce attention to the soil experienced in the last decades, has accelerated soil erosion and flooding events, which entailed high costs in terms of money and human lives, but also caused reduction of soil thickness, water holding ca…