The extent of soil erosion in upland England and Wales

Abstract

Following recommendations by the 19th Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, the area, causes and rates of upland soil erosion in England and Wales were investigated between 1997 and 1999. This paper describes the methods and results of the field survey of 1999 in which the extent of eroded ground was determined. 2. The area of degraded soil and the volume of eroded material were both determined from the dimensions of individual erosion features at 399 field sites located on an orthogonal grid across the uplands. Using measurements of individual erosion features, degraded soil extent in upland England and Wales was estimated at almost 25 000 ha, 2·46 per cent of the total upland area surveyed. Half this eroded area was revegetated and no longer subject to continued accelerated soil loss in 1999. The total volume of eroded material was estimated at 0·284 km3. Although deposition of eroded material occurred within 20 per cent of eroded field sites, the total volume of redeposited material was less than 1 per cent of the total volume of eroded soil. 3. Erosion was more extensive on peat soils than on dry, wet mineral or wet peaty mineral soils. In addition, the higher incidence of erosion at high altitudes and on low slopes reinforced the relationship between erosion and areas of peat formation. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Erosion of Uncultivated Land

“…It is in the badlands of the Mediterranean (Canton et al, 2001;Grove and Rackham, 2001), or it may be in rough equilibrium whereby the bare soil that is being initiated is balanced by that which is being recolonised by vegetation as in the peat moorlands of Britain (McHugh et al, 2002). Or is the erosional form largely stabilised by vegetation and what we see now is mostly a relict feature, as seen in the eroding peat bogs of central and north-west Ireland (Large and Hamilton, 1991).…”

“…Within Europe there are some examples of field-based measurements of erosion rates of bare soil exposed within uncultivated land (Tallis, 1973(Tallis, , 1997Evans, 1977Evans, , 1990bEvans, , 1996aPhillips et al, 1981;Birnie, 1993;Arnalds, 2000;McHugh et al, 2002) and of the extent of erosion within a small catchment (Evans, 1977), a region or a nation (Phillips et al, 1981;Evans, 1990c;Grieve et al, 1995;Arnalds et al, 2001). There are plotbased measurements of erosion for locations in some Mediterranean countries, as part of the MEDALUS project (Kosmas et al, 1997;Grove and Rackham, 2001) and for badlands in the southern French Alps (Descroix and Gautier, 2002;Mathys et al, 2003) and there is information on river sediment loads (Walling, 1988;Woodward, 1995), but such data apply to catchments which may contain both cultivated and uncultivated land, in addition to eroding river channels.…”

Existing Soil Erosion Data Sets

“…However, the calculations are based on classified input data instead of metric-scaled input data. Mapping schemes provide the database for Iceland, Norway and the UK [England and Wales only, arable land by Evans (1985) and uplands by McHugh et al (2002)]. In Austria and Poland, expert knowledge has been used to identify regions affected by soil erosion by water.…”

Soil Erosion in Britain: Updating the Record

“…This led to recommendations of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution on the need for research [59] and subsequent surveys [60,61]. In Scotland, Grieve et al report on upland erosion [62,63].…”