Present-day agriculture faces multiple challenges, including ongoing climate change that is at many locations combined with soil degradation. The deterioration of soil properties through unsustainable agricultural practices and changing climate could lead to a fall in productivity beyond the point of no return with devastating effects on ecosystem services in large areas. Identifying areas with the highest hazard levels should therefore be a top priority. The key hazards for agricultural land in the Czech Republic considered in this study include the occurrence of water stress in the topsoil layer during both the first and second half of the growing season, the proportion of fast-drying soils, the risk of sheet and ephemeral gully erosion and the risk of local floods originating primarily from agricultural land. The results clearly marked regions where primary attention should be given to reduce the level of the hazards and/or to increase cropping capacity. These regions were found to be concentrated in the southeastern and northwestern lowland areas. Typical areas with the highest hazard levels were identified: regions with low precipitation and a high proportion of soils with a degraded or naturally occurring low water-holding capacity, and those with steeper than average slopes and terrain configurations in relatively large catchment areas that have urbanized countryside landscapes located at their lower elevations. Despite some limitations, the methods presented in this paper can be applied generally as the first step in developing strategies for efficient reduction of hazard levels.
Water erosion is identified as the most severe type of soil degradation in the Czech Republic. Systematic protection preventing water erosion is not carried out in large areas of agricultural land. The map of the maximum tolerable CP factor value (the cover-management and the support-practice factors) -CP max was compiled in order to assess erosion hazard on agricultural land. It estimates the requirements of the conservation practices which would not cause soil erosion above the tolerable limit of annual soil loss. The map is based on calculations using an adjusted Universal Soil Loss Equation (USLE) and is easy to apply. It has already been applied in the Czech Republic when creating the map of erosion vulnerability for the purposes of delimitation of Standards of Good Agricultural and Environmental Conditions (GAECs), within Cross Compliance. The map covers the whole territory of the Czech Republic (scale 1:1,000,000).
Long-term water balance (WB) of four selected crops (winter wheat, oilseed rape, silage maize, semi-early potatoes) was determined at the field block scale in the Czech Republic for all agricultural growing areas (AGAs): maize-, beet-, potato- and mountain-AGAs for the 1981–2010 period. A novel approach for the calculation of WB was employed, which combined the FAO-56 method for crop water requirements (CWRs) with sources of available water from precipitation, soil, and groundwater. The computed WB was divided into four categories of soil water availability based on soil hydrolimits and crop features: Categories 1 and 2 with zero or mild occurrence of crop water stress; categories 3 and 4 with intermediate and severe occurrence of crop water stress. The winter crops were affected by water stress to a lesser extent (the area of categories 3 and 4: wheat 20.1%, oilseed rape 14.5%) as compared with spring crops (the area of categories 3 and 4: maize 39.6%, potatoes 41%). The highest water deficit was recorded for all crops in the maize-AGA due to low precipitation and high CWRs. Most available water was revealed to occur in the mountain-AGA. A strong need for the adoption of measures towards the optimization of water regimes on agricultural land was indicated. The present study shows a promising approach for evaluating and proposing changes of area of cultivated crops with the appropriate tillage and agricultural water management in terms of satisfactory crop water requirements.
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