Appraisal of Soil Erosion Risk in the Eastern Himalayan Region of India for Soil Conservation Planning

Abstract

Management practices to minimise soil erosion can be effectively carried out if the magnitude and the spatial distribution of soil erosion risk areas are known. Prioritisation of soil erosion risk areas is a challenging task, especially in the developing countries because of non‐availability of relevant data and analytical tools for such an assessment. As a result, it becomes difficult to establish appropriate soil conservation measures on the risk‐prone areas to reduce soil loss and ensure development of a sustainable management of soil resources. Such a database can be better generated and analysed in a geographical information system (GIS) environment to delineate and prioritise the soil erosion risk areas at state or regional level. Therefore, a methodology was developed to assess the soil erosion risks in eastern Himalayan region by integrating spatial data on prevailing erosion rates and soil loss tolerance limits in GIS environment. By comparing the potential erosion rates with permissible rates, we observed that about 58·94 per cent of total geographical area (TGA) of the region requires different degrees of erosion management and 28·38 per cent of TGA falls under no treatment category because of higher values of permissible erosion limits. It can be successfully applied to assess and prioritise soil erosion risks in any region or country and identify best management practices to bring the erosion losses within the permissible limits. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The immediate effectiveness of barley straw mulch in reducing soil erodibility and surface runoff generation in Mediterranean vineyards

“…According to Jordán et al (2011), mulch is any material, other than soil, placed or left on the soil surface for soil and water management purposes. Mulching involves maintaining a permanent or semi-permanent protective cover on the soil surface that can be composed of different materials such as vegetative residues, biological geotextiles, gravel and crushed stones (Cerdà, 2001;Gilley et al, 1986;Jordán et al, 2010;Mandal and Sharda, 2013;Smets et al, 2008;Xu et al, 2012;Zhao et al, 2013). The beneficial effects of mulching can be summarized as follows: i) increased water intake and storage (Cook et al, 2006;Mulumba and Lal, 2008), ii) protection of soil against raindrop impact, reducing erosion rates (Blavet et al, 2009;Jordán et al, 2010;Sadeghi et al, 2015a), iii) decreased sediment and nutrient concentrations in runoff (Cerdà, 1998;Gholami et al, 2013;Poesen and Lavee, 1991), iv) decreased runoff generation rates and surface flow velocity by increasing roughness (Cerdà, 2001;Jordán et al, 2010), v) improved infiltration capacity (Jordán et al, 2010;Wang et al, 2014), vi) increased activity of some species of earthworms and crop performance (Wooldridge and Harris, 1991), vii) enhanced soil physical conditions such as soil structure and organic content (De Silva and Cook, 2003;Jordán et al, 2010;Karami et al, 2012), viii) reduced topsoil temperature for more optimum germination and root development (Dahiya et al, 2007;Riddle et al, 1996) and decreased evaporation (Uson and Cook, 1995), and xix) enhanced interactions with nutrients (Campiglia et al, 2014;Movahedi Naeni and Cook, 2000).…”

Quantifying annual soil and nutrient lost by rill erosion in continuously used semiarid farmlands, North Ethiopia

“…These channels act as sediment sources and transport passages leading to soil loss (Wirtz et al 2012). Although soil erosion is a natural process, it has been accelerated by human impact on the landscape due to continuous agriculture activities, overgrazing, mining and others (Gimenez-Morera et al 2010;Leh et al 2013;Lieskovský and Kenderessy 2012;Mandal and Sharda 2013;Zhao et al 2013;Ziadat and Taimeh 2013). Tillage results in the permanent alteration of the soil structure and soil aggregate, leading to increased soil erosion (Ramos-Scharron and Macdonald 2007).…”

Karst bare slope soil erosion and soil quality: a simulation case study

“…A part of water and soil enter the underground rivers along with the fissures and the ponors, so that water and soil loss in karst regions is classified into surface loss and underground soil leak, which have obvious difference compared with that in non-karst regions such as agricultural land reported by Cerdà et al (2009aCerdà et al ( , b, 2010 and García-Orenes et al (2009). In non-karst regions, soil erosion is mainly related to surface cover, slope, and rainfall conditions (Cerdà, 2000;Giménez et al, 2010;Biro et al, 2013;Haregeweyn et al, 2013) and it could be prevented if people take reasonable measures (Haile and Fetene, 2012;Prokop and Poręba, 2012;Mandal and Sharda, 2013). However, due to special geologic structure in karst regions, soil erosion is rather more complicated than that in non-karst regions.…”