Search results for "Soil"
showing 10 items of 3493 documents
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 a spatially distributed sediment delivery model (SEDD) in a forested basin by cesium-137 technique
2005
The aim of the paper is to validate the sediment delivery distributed (SEDD) model for estimating hillslope sediment yield estimates using net soil erosion values obtained by the cesium-137 technique. The cesium-137 technique provides spatially-distributed measurements useful to verify the predictive capability of a distributed sediment yield model. The application of the cesium-137 technique requires a calibration procedure to convert measurements of 137Cs inventories to estimates of net soil erosion rates. Rainfall and sediment yield data from 1978 to 1994 in a small Calabrian basin forested with eucalyptus trees, were initially used to calibrate, at mean annual temporal scale, the SEDD m…
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
Rill flow velocity and resistance law: A review
2022
Rills caused by runoff concentration on erodible hillslopes generally have very irregular longitudinal profiles and cross-section shapes. Rill erosion directly depends on the hydraulics of flow within the rills which may differ greatly from that in larger and regular channels like streams or rivers. At first, in this paper, a review of the two different approaches to estimate rill flow velocity, based on flow regime and flow resistance laws, is presented. Recent advances in measurements of rill geometry by the three-dimensional photo-reconstruction (3D-PR) technique, which allows one to obtain a Digital Terrain Model (DTM) by low-altitude aerial and terrestrial photogrammetry, are also disc…
Theoretical advancements on a recently proposed method to measure rainfall energy
2022
Soil erosion induced by rainfall is mainly due to the rainfall impact besides the consequent surface runoff. Rainfall kinetic energy is the most used variable to represent its erosivity. The latter represents the weathering attitude to erode soil and is a fundamental variable of the erosion process. Consequently, precise measurements of rainfall erosivity have to perform to develop a reliable prediction model of the erosive phenomenon. Currently, impact energy can be reliably measured only by disdrometers. These instruments measure the Drop Size Distribution (DSD) which, joined with the raindrop falling velocity, allow to calculate, by integration, the impact kinetic energy. However, disdro…
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…
Shifting Long-Term Tillage to Geotextile Mulching for Weed Control Improves Soil Quality and Yield of Orange Orchards
2023
Weed control in urban and peri-urban orange orchards is challenging due to operational and legislative restrictions. Tillage, besides from negatively affecting soil fertility and microorganisms, is demanding for humans. On the other hand, herbicides are advised against due to the possibility to reach waterbodies from the soil surface. Therefore, in urban and peri-urban areas, instead of tillage and herbicides, mulching with black plastic geotextile fabric is often used. This study aimed at assessing the impact of long-term soil mulching with black plastic geotextile fabric on soil fertility, microbial community and yield of an orange orchard in comparison to conventional tillage. To this ai…
Modelling the effects of a bushfire on erosion in a Mediterranean basin
2007
A bushfire occurred in the Asinaro River basin in July 1998. The basin area is 55 km2 and about 74% of the whole area was set on fire. The aim of this paper is to test the influence of fire on both soil erosion and the spatial distribution of the areas characterized by the greatest sediment yield values. The RUSLE model and a spatial disaggregation criterion for sediment delivery processes (SEDD model) were used to test the effects of the bushfire. The basin was divided into 854 morphological units for calculating the topographic factor. The RUSLE climatic factor R was calculated using daily rainfall data. The soil erodibility factor was determined by sampling at sites distributed over the …
Measuring the USLE soil erodibility factor in the unit plots of Sparacia (southern Italy) experimental area
2022
The Universal Soil Loss Equation (USLE) is still widely used to predict soil loss by water erosion and to establish soil conservation measures. In this model, the soil erodibility factor K accounts for the susceptibility of the soil to be eroded due to the detachment and transport processes operated by the erosive agents. According to the USLE scheme, the K factor should be measured on unit plots, i.e., bare plots of given length (22 m) and steepness (9%) tilled along the maximum slope direction, but there is little evidence that there ever existed an actual unit plot between the plots used to develop the USLE. Given the difficulty in collecting sufficient data to adequately measure K, the …