Soil Erosion Assessment in Wood Pastures and Tree-Less Pastures (A Case Study: Hârtibaciului Tableland)

Abstract

The management of pastures is very important to reduce soil erosion. A special attention is generally needed for the wood pastures which combine livestock grazing with trees and shrubs. In this paper, we investigated the differencess between the wood pastures and tree-less pastures and their role to prevent or mitigate the soil erosion. The soil erosion assessment has been performed by using of RUSLE and GIS. The model has been applied in two study-polygons with wood pasture and tree-less pasture located in the northern part of Hartibaciului Tableland (Romania). Our outcomes showed and highlighted by comparison that wood pastures have a lower predicted annual soil loss than pastures with accidental presence of trees. This fact suggests that wood pastures are more resilient to soil erosion than tree-less pasture. The metholology tried to calibrate a preliminary model of soil erosion assessment for wood pastures into the southern part of Transylvania.