Rainfall simulation and Structure-from-Motion photogrammetry for the analysis of soil water erosion in Mediterranean vineyards

Abstract

Soil water erosion is a serious problem, especially in agricultural lands. Among these, vineyards deserve attention, because they constitute for the Mediterranean areas a type of land use affected by high soil losses. A significant problem related to the study of soil water erosion in these areas consists in the lack of a standardized procedure of collecting data and reporting results, mainly due to a variability among the measurement methods applied. Given this issue and the seriousness of soil water erosion in Mediterranean vineyards, this works aims to quantify the soil losses caused by simulated rainstorms, and compare them with each other depending on two different methodologies: (i) rainfall simulation and (ii) surface elevation change-based, relying on high-resolution Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) derived from a photogrammetric technique (Structure-from-Motion or SfM). The experiments were carried out in a typical Mediterranean vineyard, located in eastern Spain, at very fine scales. SfM data were obtained from one reflex camera and a smartphone built-in camera. An index of sediment connectivity was also applied to evaluate the potential effect of connectivity within the plots. DEMs derived from the smartphone and the reflex camera were comparable with each other in terms of accuracy and capability of estimating soil loss. Furthermore, soil loss estimated with the surface elevation change-based method resulted to be Contents lists available at ScienceDirectScience of the Total Environment j o u r n a l h o m e p a g e : w w w . e l s e v i e r . c o m / l o c a t e / s c i t o t e n v of the same order of magnitude of that one obtained with rainfall simulation, as long as the sediment connectivity within the plot was considered. High-resolution topography derived from SfM revealed to be essential in the sediment connectivity analysis and, therefore, in the estimation of eroded materials, when comparing them to those derived from the rainfall simulation methodology. The fact that smartphones built-in cameras could produce as much satisfying results as those derived from reflex cameras is a high value added for using SfM.

Improving stock unearthing method to measure soil erosion rates in vineyards

“…Gerlach troughs (Biddoccu et al, 2016;Rodrigo-Comino et al, 2017a, rainfall simulation experiments (Prosdocimi et al, 2017;Rodrigo Comino et al, 2015;Rodrigo-Comino et al, 2016c) or erosion pins (Novara et al, 2011), watershed discharge measurements and modeling (Keesstra et al, 2014) have provided detailed information Fig. 3.…”

Soil erosion in sloping vineyards under conventional and organic land use managements (Saar-Mosel Valley, Germany)

“…Since erosion in vineyards is a wide-spread problem (Rodrigo Comino et al, 2016d;Prosdocimi et al, 2016a;Biddoccu et al, 2016), different management strategies are applied to reduce it. Grass cover or cover crops are often used to reduce runoff and erosion (Biddoccu et al, 2016, Ruiz-Colmenero et al, 2011, Novara et al, 2011 but in some other cases they can enhance the variability of runoff and soil loss since the grass cover is not dense enough to halt runoff in the wheel tracks (Morvan et al, 2014;Sastre et al, 2016).…”

Catchment based hydrology under post farmland abandonment scenarios

“…Calculation of the IC requires knowledge of the characteristics of the drainage area and of the flow path. This approach is currently the most widely used around the world, including in Turkey (D'Haen et al, 2013), Japan (Chartin et al, 2017), Australia (Vigiak et al, 2012), Italy (Cavalli et al, 2016), Spain (López-Vicente et al, 2013aProsdocimi et al, 2017) and Mexico (Ortíz-Rodríguez et al, 2017).…”