Soil Erosion and Land Degradation

Predicting soil erosion for alternative land uses.

The APEX (Agricultural Policy-Environmental eXtender) model developed in the United States was calibrated for northwestern China's conditions. The model was then used to investigate soil erosion effects associated with alternative land uses at the ZFG (Zi-Fang-Gully) watershed in northwestern China. The results indicated that the APEX model could be calibrated reasonably well (+/-15% errors) to...

The Effect of Land use and Soil Erosion on Soil Organic Carbon and Nitrogen Stock

  Soil organic carbon (SOC) is a principal component in soil quality assessment. Knowledge of SOC and total nitrogen (TN) stocks are important keys to understand the role of SOC in the global carbon cycle and, as a result, in the mitigation of global greenhouse effects. SOC and TN stocks are functions of the SOC concentration and the bulk density of the soil that are prone to changes, influe...

The development of land quality indicators for soil degradation by water erosion

The paper describes a proposed methodology for estimating water erosion risk for large areas. The estimates are based on a one-dimensional hydrological balance and a physically based sediment transport model. Estimates of risk associated with a given storm amount are integrated over the frequency distribution of daily rainfalls to provide a properly weighted estimate of the average annual risk....

The Corine Project on Soil Erosion Risk and Land Quality

LAND USE: U.S. Soil Erosion Rates--Myth and Reality.

No problem of resource or environmental management can be rationally addressed until its true space and time dimensions are known. The limitations of the universal soil loss equation and the wind erosion equation are such that we do not seem to have a truly informed idea of how much soil erosion is occurring in this country, let alone of the processes of sediment movement and deposition. The un...