Runoff and interrill erosion as affected by grass cover in a semi-arid rangeland of northern Mexico

Comparison between effects of open grazing and manual harvesting of cultivated summer rangelands of northern Iran on infiltration, runoff and sediment yield

“…In the present study, inter-related factors of canopy cover and soil organic matter significantly affect runoff and thus sediment loss, since there is no much difference between other controlling factors in the study treatments. Similar emphases were also made by Gutierrez and Hernandez (1996). …”

“…Water in soil occupies soil porosity, reduces soil infiltrability and increases runoff as similarly reported by Gutierrez and Hernandez (1996). Change in vegetation cover conditions also may affect on experimental hydrologic responses.…”

“…The less amount of runoff generation under cultivation treatments may be supposed as a resultant of increasing litter and plant residues (Loch, 2000) as well as proper managerial approach of alfalfa cultivation and increasing of soil fertility (Cooke, 1985;Bennett, 2001;Haan et al, 2005). The improvement of infiltration conditions and soil stability through eliminating direct and indirect effects of treading in open grazing treatment can also be considered as an effective factor in decreasing runoff coefficient as reported by Gutierrez and Hernandez (1996) in northern Mexico, and Pande and Yamamoto (2006) in mountainous grassland of Japan. The difference between performances of treatments in runoff generation could also be much more, in case the vegetation coverage decreases from the critical limit, which is certainly less than that presently exists.…”

“…All studies show that the grazing compacts the surface soil at different levels besides removing the vegetation cover and the infiltration velocity therefore decreases. Some other researches such as Johnson et al (1980), Warren et al (1986), Wilcox et al (1990), Hofmann and Ries (1991), ZiSbisch (1993), Bari et al (1995), Gutierrez and Hernandez (1996), Mwendra and Mohamed Saleem (1997), Loch (2000), Russell et al (2001), Emmerich and Heitschmidt (2001), John et al (2002), Wang et al (2004), Haan et al (2005) and Pande and Yamamoto (2006) have also focused on effects of different grazing intensities on runoff generation and sediment yield. All of them have reported that the runoff and soil erosion are significantly affected by amount and type of cover, grazing intensity and growing season on rangelands, which consequently lead to different level of land degradation.…”

Effects of landscape restoration on soil water storage and water use in the Loess Plateau Region, China

“…A positive correlation between soil bulk density and the surface runoff was indicated by Gutierrez and Hernandez (1996) and Calvo-Casses et al (2003). High soil bulk density usually corresponds to a lack of soil structure and as such to lower infiltration rates and higher runoff depths (Descheemaeker et al, 2006).…”