Effects of land use and landscape on spatial distribution and morphological features of gullies in an agropastoral area in Sardinia (Italy)

Gully erosion susceptibility assessment by means of GIS-based logistic regression: A case of Sicily (Italy)

“…Soil erosion by water is considered one of the major causes of land degradation in a wide range of environments (UNEP, 1994;Valentin et al, 2005;Zucca et al, 2006;Bou Kheir et al, 2007). In light of this, over the past decades, a large number of investigations have been carried out aiming at developing and testing methods for the evaluation of soil erosion processes.…”

“…Gullies occur when a geomorphologic threshold is exceeded due to an increase in water flow erosivity and/or sediment erodibility (Patton and Schumm, 1975;Imeson and Kwaad, 1980;Poesen et al, 2003;Martínez-Casasnovas et al, 2004;Valentin et al, 2005;Zucca et al, 2006;Gómez Gutiérrez et al, 2011;Torri et al, 2012a). Environmental factors controlling critical conditions for gully development are mainly related to rainfall, topography, soil, lithology and land use.…”

Variación temporal de la erosión por cárcavas en los fondos de valle bajo explotación de dehesa

“…Este hecho coincide con las tendencias regionales constatadas por otros autores (Lavado Contador et al, 2004;Plieninger, 2006) y que muestran un aumento notable de la cabaña ganadera como consecuencia del ingreso de España en la Unión Europea y de la adopción de la Política Agraria Común que basará sus subvenciones en el número de cabezas de ganado potenciando el sobrepastoreo (Lyrintzis, 1996). El sobrepastoreo, ha sido señalado en algunos trabajos como causa principal de la aparición y desarrollo de cárcavas en zonas de pastoreo de Ecuador (Podwojewski et al, 2002), de Nueva Zelanda (Gómez et al, 2003), de Etiopía (Nyssen et al, 2004), en la isla chilena de Rapa Nui (Mieth y Bork, 2005) y también en zonas agrarias y de pastoreo de Italia (Zucca et al, 2006). Actualmente el sobrepastoreo parece el principal problema para la conservación de los suelos de algunos espacios adehesados, especialmente en las vaguadas.…”

Gullies and debris flows analysis: a case study in Sardinia and a rheological modelling approach

“…It is then fundamental to monitor, experiment and model how the environment is affected by Gully erosion. Under the latter aspect, Sardinia is representative of many Mediterranean rural areas: in particular, its agropastoral activity is the main land degradation cause, especially since a lot of its Mediterranean maquis is being eliminated for the creation of new pastures [4,5], making soil erosion an ever increasing and diffused phenomenon. Related to the same topic of land use and environmental control, Mud and debris flows are mixtures of water and sediment which can, under certain conditions, produce destructive flows that contribute to the growth of alluvial fans in mountainous areas.…”