Search results for " soil erosion"

Assessment of climate impacts on hydrology and geomorphology of semiarid headwater basins using a physically-based model.

2013

The response of watershed erosion rates to changes in climate is expected to be highly non-linear and thus demands for mechanistic approaches to improve our understanding of the underlying causes. In this study, the integrated geomorphic component tRIBS-Erosion of the physically-based, spatially distributed hydrological model, tRIBS, the TIN-based Real-time Integrated Basin Simulator, is used to analyze the sensitivity of small semi-arid headwater basins to projected climate conditions. Observed historic climate and downscaled realizations of general circulation models from CMIP3 inform the stochastic weather generator AWE-GEN (Advanced WEather GENerator), which is used to produce two clima…

MANAGING SUBTERRANEAN CLOVER, ANNUAL MEDIC AND VETCH FOR SICILIAN VINEYARD SUSTAINABILITY

2004

During 2005/2006 a vineyards, located in south-west of Sicily (37° 60’ N – 12° 30 E), were subjected to five different soil managements: “conventional” ( T ) soil management using up to eight soil plowing with a five furrow plow; natural cover cropping ( N ), vetch cover cropping ( V ) (Vicia sativa L.); subclover cover cropping ( S ) (trifolium subterraneum var. Clare); medic cover cropping ( M ) (medicago polymorpha var. Santiago). In the layer 0-25 cm, soil moisture, total N, NO3, NH4, and soil organic matter were determined. Fresh and dry biomass weight, and total nitrogen percentage were determined on nine one square meter subplots for each thesis. Soil erosion was measured, using a Ge…

Testing flow resistance equation for rill flow

2018

At first, in this paper a flow resistance equation for rill flow, deduced applying dimensional analysis and self-similarity theory, is presented. The incomplete self-similarity hypothesis is used for establishing the flow velocity distribution whose integration gives the theoretical expression of the Darcy-Weisbach friction factor. Then the deduced theoretical resistance equation, which is calibrated by some measurements of flow velocity, water depth, cross section area, wetted perimeter and bed slope carried out in 106 reaches of some rills modelled on an experimental plot, is tested using the literature data by Abrahams et al. (1996), Strohmeier et al. (2014) and Peng et al. (2015) for ri…

Comment on “Effects of different tillage practices on the hydraulic resistance of concentrated flow on the loess plateau in China” by J. Sun et al

2020

Abstract For concentrated flows, which are characterized by small water depth and steep sloping beds, hydraulic conditions different from those typical of streams and rivers occur. In this study a new theoretically deduced flow resistance equation was tested using the experimental data by Sun et al. for three different tilled surfaces (Manual Dibbling, MD, Manual Hoeing, MH, and Contour Drilling, CD). At first, the profile parameter-relationship, which is the relationship between the velocity profile parameter Γ, the channel slope and the flow Froude number, was calibrated using rill flow data by Di Stefano et al. Then, the applicability of this relationship was tested by the measurements o…

Application of hydroseeding for environmental protection in the Mediterranean area

2011

Improving soil and water conservation and ecosystem services by sustainable soil management practices: From a global to an Italian soil partnership

2020

The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) identify the need to restore degraded soils in order to improve productivity and the provision of ecosystem services. The aim is to support food production, store and supply clean water, conserve biodiversity, sequester carbon, and improve soil resilience in a context of climate change. Within this framework, in order to achieve the SDGs and to correct land management in the long-term, soil management is considered mandatory. The reduction of land degradation should be based on various sustainable soil management practices that improve and maintain soil organic matter levels, increase water infiltration, and improve soil water management. This tec…

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…

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…