Erosion control strategies

Erosion control information? The most effective way of minimizing erosion is to guarantee a permanent surface cover on the soil surface, such as trees, pasture, or meadow. However, compared to original forest soils, soils in pasture fields and croplands have less capacity to hold up and are more susceptible to erosion. These soils also have less capacity to absorb water, which makes flooding (and its economic, social, and environmental impacts) more common. The increasingly high demand of a growing population for commodities such as coffee, soybean, palm oil or wheat is clearing land for agriculture. Unfortunately, clearing autochthonous trees and replacing them with new tree crops that don’t necessarily hold onto the soil increases the risks of soil erosion. With time, as topsoil (the most nutrient-rich part of the soil) is lost, putting agriculture under threat.

Water is nature’s most versatile tool. For example, take rain on a frigid day. The water pools in cracks and crevices. Then, at night, the temperature drops and the water expands as it turns to ice, splitting the rock like a sledgehammer to a wedge. The next day, under the beating sun, the ice melts and trickles the cracked fragments away. Repeated swings in temperature can also weaken and eventually fragment rock, which expands when hot and shrinks when cold. Such pulsing slowly turns stones in the arid desert to sand. Likewise, constant cycles from wet to dry will crumble clay.

Continued deflation of loose particles from landforms leaves behind larger particles that are more resistant to deflation. Wind action transports eroded material above or along the surface of Earth either by turbulent flow (in which particles move in all directions) or by laminar flow (in which adjacent sheets of air slip past one another). The transportation of wind-eroded material continues until the velocity of the wind can no longer sustain the size particle being transported or until the windblown particles collide with or cling to a surface feature. See even more info on what is erosion website.

Trees are widely known to impact the ecosystem hydrological cycle and resultant water availability and quality (Brown and Binkley 1994; Marc and Robinson 2007; Keenan and Van Dijk 2010; Carvalho-Santos et al. 2014). As vegetation cover plays a crucial role in erosion and runoff rates, afforestation is considered among the best options for soil conservation (Durán Zuazo and Rodríguez Pleguezuelo 2008; Lu et al. 2004; Gyssels et al. 2005; Panagos et al. 2015b; Ganasri and Ramesh 2016).

Planting grass in heavily eroded areas is called an agrostological measure. Ley farming practices cultivating grass in rotation with regular crops to increase the nutrient level in the soils. When the grass is harvested it can be used as fodder for cattle. For heavily eroded soil it is recommended to grown grass for many years to let the soils naturally repair themselves. This is the method of growing crops year-round without changing the topography of the soil by tilling or contouring. This technique increases the amount of water that penetrates the soil and can increase organic matter of the soil which leads to larger yields.