Reducing sediment concentration and soil loss using organic and inorganic amendments at plot scale

Abstract

Abstract. Various organic and inorganic mulches are used for soil conservation purposes, the effectiveness of which on soil characteristics has not been comprehensively considered from different aspects. The present study surveys the efficiency of straw mulch, manure and TA-200 polyacrylamide with respective rates of 500, 300 and 50 g m −2 in changing sediment concentration and soil loss. The experiments were conducted for sandy-loam soil taken from a summer rangeland, the Alborz Mountains, northern Iran. The experiments were performed under laboratory conditions with simulated rainfall intensities of 30, 50, 70 and 90 mm h −1 and a slope of 30 %. The results showed that the straw mulch decreased soil erosion at rate of 45.60 % compared to the control plots and performed better than manure (8.98 % reduction) and PAM (4.74 % reduction). The results showed that the maximum reduction in sediment concentration and soil loss for all soil amendments occurred at the rainfall intensity of 90 mm h −1 with the rates of 58.69 and 63.24 % for straw mulch, 14.65 and 13.14 % for manure and 20.15 and 23.44 % for TA-200.

The immediate effectiveness of barley straw mulch in reducing soil erodibility and surface runoff generation in Mediterranean vineyards

“…Mulching involves maintaining a permanent or semi-permanent protective cover on the soil surface that can be composed of different materials such as vegetative residues, biological geotextiles, gravel and crushed stones (Cerdà, 2001;Gilley et al, 1986;Jordán et al, 2010;Mandal and Sharda, 2013;Smets et al, 2008;Xu et al, 2012;Zhao et al, 2013). The beneficial effects of mulching can be summarized as follows: i) increased water intake and storage (Cook et al, 2006;Mulumba and Lal, 2008), ii) protection of soil against raindrop impact, reducing erosion rates (Blavet et al, 2009;Jordán et al, 2010;Sadeghi et al, 2015a), iii) decreased sediment and nutrient concentrations in runoff (Cerdà, 1998;Gholami et al, 2013;Poesen and Lavee, 1991), iv) decreased runoff generation rates and surface flow velocity by increasing roughness (Cerdà, 2001;Jordán et al, 2010), v) improved infiltration capacity (Jordán et al, 2010;Wang et al, 2014), vi) increased activity of some species of earthworms and crop performance (Wooldridge and Harris, 1991), vii) enhanced soil physical conditions such as soil structure and organic content (De Silva and Cook, 2003;Jordán et al, 2010;Karami et al, 2012), viii) reduced topsoil temperature for more optimum germination and root development (Dahiya et al, 2007;Riddle et al, 1996) and decreased evaporation (Uson and Cook, 1995), and xix) enhanced interactions with nutrients (Campiglia et al, 2014;Movahedi Naeni and Cook, 2000). Among the different types of mulching, straw mulch is considered one of the most effective in achieving the above-mentioned benefits (Blavet et al, 2009;Dahiya et al, 2007).…”

“…Staff of the Soil Erosion and Degradation Research (SEDER) group have been studying soil erosion processes due to agriculture and cooperating with farmers to find possible solutions to soil erosion issues in vineyards, olive groves, and fruit and almond orchards. Among the soil conservation practices that have recently been implemented, mulching has proven to be effective in reducing water and soil loss rates and improving soil condition Cook et al, 2006;García-Orenes et al 2009;Jordán et al, 2010;Mwango et al, 2015;Mulumba and Lal, 2008;Sadeghi et al, 2015a;Tebrügge and Düring, 1999;Winteraeken and Spaan, 2010). According to Jordán et al (2011), mulch is any material, other than soil, placed or left on the soil surface for soil and water management purposes.…”

Zero net livelihood degradation – the quest for a multidimensional protocol to combat desertification

“…The dominant approaches of many suggested practices are still purely biophysical (e.g. García-Orenes et al, 2012;Weyers and Spokas, 2014;Sadeghi et al, 2015;Cerdà et al, 2015). However, the livelihood approach provides the perspective that natural resource degradation should be tackled in a wider manner than only a cause-and-effect logic due to a linear ecological process (Gharibvand et al, 2015).…”

The impact of standard preparation practice on the runoff and soil erosion rates under laboratory conditions

“…In addi- tion, different methods of measuring runoff and erosion may lead to non-identical results that are not necessarily related to specific effects on studied variables (Cerdà et al, 2009bSelkimäki et al, 2016;Zhao et al, 2016). Nowadays, the use of rainfall simulators in laboratory and field studies is considered more and more because of their ability to control the intensity and duration of rainfall, which leads to an increase in the accuracy of data (Sadeghi et al, 2015;Davudirad et al, 2016). On the other hand, measuring runoff and soil loss at the plot scale has been of crucial importance from the beginning of the soil erosion research (Licznar and Nearing, 2003).…”

“…The identification and quantification of the hydrological properties and processes that induce runoff and soil erosion are necessary to determine the amount of soil erosion (Cerdà et al, 1997;Cerdà, 1999;Ramos et al, 2000;Iserloh et al, 2012Iserloh et al, , 2013León et al, 2013;. Although the measurement of runoff and sediment using rainfall simulators can be performed in the laboratory (Gholami et al, 2014;Bochet, 2015;Rodrigo Comino et al, 2015b, 2016aSadeghi et al, 2015) and field conditions (Cerdà et al, 2009a;Lieskovský and Kenderessy, 2014;Biswas et al, 2015;Bochet, 2015;Pereira et al, 2015;Ochoa et al, 2016;Rodrigo Comino et al, 2016), field measurements are usually costly and time-consuming work. In addi- tion, different methods of measuring runoff and erosion may lead to non-identical results that are not necessarily related to specific effects on studied variables (Cerdà et al, 2009bSelkimäki et al, 2016;Zhao et al, 2016).…”