Modelling the impact of historic landscape change on soil erosion and degradation

Abstract

International policies and guidelines often highlight the divide between ‘nature’ and ‘heritage’ in landscape management, and the weakness of monodisciplinary approaches. This study argues that historic agricultural practices have played a key role in shaping today’s landscapes, creating a heritage which affords opportunities for more sustainable landscape management. The paper develops a new interdisciplinary approach with particular reference to soil loss and degradation over the long term. It presents innovative methods for assessing and modelling how pre-industrial agricultural features can mitigate soil erosion risk in response to current environmental conditions. Landscape archaeology data presented through Historic Landscape Characterisation are integrated in a GIS-RUSLE model to illustrate the impact of varying historic land-uses on soil erosion. The resulting analyses could be used to inform strategies for sustainable land resource planning.

The Evolution of Historic Agroforestry Landscape in the Northern Apennines (Italy) and Its Consequences for Slope Geomorphic Processes

“…This research focused on a portion of the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines coinciding with the municipality of Vetto d'Enza (Emilia Romagna Region, northern Italy). The main characteristics of this historic rural landscape trace their origin back to the Middle Ages in the period of the Great Countess Matilda of Canossa (10th-11th century CE) and the area's land management system appears to have remained largely unaltered until the end of the 19th century CE [47] (Figure 1).…”

“…The ESDAC C factor values were chosen to potentially extend the reproducibility of this protocol in other European regions. Lastly, the support practices factors (i.e., P factors) were developed using the equation proposed in Brandolini et al, 2023 [47], which calculates the effectiveness of historic landscape features (i.e., terraces and field boundaries) in reducing soil erosion hazards according to their state of conservation and regional topography (Figure 3).…”

“…This previous study revealed that forestry activities led to a noticeable increase in soil mass movements, although it did not account for the effects of historic landscape transformation in the model. On the other hand, a recent paper used a GIS modelling approach to estimate soil loss variation in the Northern Apennines in accordance with the level of conservation of historic landscape features (e.g., terrace farming and field boundaries) [47], but it did not explore the effect of historic land-use change on soil deposition processes.…”

Integrated Approach of Historical Landscape Characterisation Techniques and Remote Sensing for the Definition of Predictive Models and Scenario Analysis in the Planning of Archaeological Areas

“…In more detail, HLC is carried out by examining the current landscape through the use of maps, aerial photographs, or other sources, and characterising it according to particular component patterns into landscape 'types'. These types are usually defined prior to mapping [23,24].…”

Human-altered soil loss contributes to nearly half of water erosion in China

“…R-factor and K-factor were obtained from the open databases and previous publicly published literature, meanwhile LS-factor was calculated according to the widely used methods in previous studies (see Method S1). The other factors including the C-factor and P-factor are the crucial parameters to quantify the effect of human activities on soil erosion with a range of 0-1, re ecting the land use/cover setting 41 . This study calculates the two factors under different scenarios which is the most important procedure of the framework for quantifying the HASE.…”