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Soil tillage is usually considered as a process having only an indirect influence on soil erosion. This paper describes the results of field experiments carried out with a mouldboard and a chisel plough showing that an important net downslope soil movement can be associated with soil tillage. Available experimental evidence suggests that the soil redistribution by tillage can be described by a diffusion-type equation, which allows the intensity of the process to be characterized by a single number, which may be called the diffusion constant. The experimentally determined values of the diffusion constant vary between 100 and 400 kg mpl apl. This implies that erosion and sedimentation rates associated with tillage may be more important than those associated with water erosion on much of the hilly arable land in western Europe. A comparison of recent hillslope evolution with model simulation results corroborates this conclusion. Therefore, tillage should be considered as a soil degradation process per se, rather than a process which makes the soil more sensitive to erosion.

Portable bedload traps ͑0.3 by 0.2 m opening͒ were developed for sampling coarse bedload transport in mountain gravel-bed rivers during wadable high flows. The 0.9 m long trailing net can capture about 20 kg of gravel and cobbles. Traps are positioned on ground plates anchored in the streambed to minimize disturbance of the streambed during sampling. This design permits sampling times of up to 1 h, overcoming short-term temporal variability issues. Bedload traps were tested in two streams and appear to collect representative samples of gravel bedload transport. Bedload rating and flow competence curves are well-defined and steeper than those obtained by a Helley-Smith sampler. Rating curves from both samplers differ most at low flow but approach each other near bankfull flow. Critical flow determined from bedload traps is similar using the largest grain and the small transport rate method, suggesting suitability of bedload trap data for incipient motion studies.

In steep mountain streams, macro-roughness elements typically increase both flow energy dissipation and the threshold of motion compared to lower-gradient channels, reducing the part of the flow energy available for bed load transport. Bed load transport models typically take account of these effects either by reducing the acting bed shear stress or by increasing the critical parameters for particle entrainment. Here we evaluate bed load transport models for mixed-size sediments and models based on a median grain size using a large field data set of fractional bed load transport rates. We derive reference shear stresses and bed load transport relations based on both the total boundary shear stress and a reduced (or ''effective'') shear stress that accounts for flow resistance due to macro-roughness. When reference shear stresses are derived from the total boundary shear stress, they are closely related to channel slope, but when they are derived from the effective shear stress, they are almost invariant with channel slope. The performance of bed load transport models is generally comparable when using the total shear stress and a channel slope-related reference shear stress, or when using the effective shear stress and a constant reference shear stress. However, dimensionless bed load transport relations are significantly steeper for the total stress approach, whereas they are similar to the commonly used fractional Wilcock and Crowe (WC) transport model for the effective stress approach. This similarity in the relations allows the WC model, developed for lower-gradient streams, to be used in combination with an effective shear stress approach, in steep mountain streams.