Everything on erosion, a full guide? Soil is a very important resource that allows the production of food, fiber, or forages. Despite it being a renewable resource, it renews slowly – generating three centimeters of topsoil takes 1,000 years. Therefore, protecting it is very important to bet on long-term, sustainable agricultural practices since one of the main issues associated with soil erosion is that it comes along a decrease in soil productivity. These productivity losses reduce the quantity and quality of the food we eat. A study based on the results of 40 soil associations reported that the effects of soil erosion on soil productivity were mostly the result of subsoil properties such as soil water availability, root growth or plow layer fertility – which impact yield results. In the end, with an unfavorable subsoil, erosion is easier and yields and productivity are more greatly affected.
Water is nature’s most versatile tool. For example, take rain on a frigid day. The water pools in cracks and crevices. Then, at night, the temperature drops and the water expands as it turns to ice, splitting the rock like a sledgehammer to a wedge. The next day, under the beating sun, the ice melts and trickles the cracked fragments away. Repeated swings in temperature can also weaken and eventually fragment rock, which expands when hot and shrinks when cold. Such pulsing slowly turns stones in the arid desert to sand. Likewise, constant cycles from wet to dry will crumble clay.
The broadest application of the term erosion embraces the general wearing down and molding of all landforms on Earth’s surface, including the weathering of rock in its original position, the transport of weathered material, and erosion caused by wind action and fluvial, marine, and glacial processes. This broad definition is more correctly called denudation, or degradation, and includes mass-movement processes. A narrow and somewhat limiting definition of erosion excludes the transport of eroded material by natural agencies, but the exclusion of the transport phenomenon makes the distinction between erosion and weathering very vague. Discover more information at what is erosion guide.
Climate change may strongly influence soil erosion risk, namely through variations in the precipitation pattern. Forests may contribute to mitigate the impacts of climate change on soil erosion and forest managers are thus challenged by the need to define strategies that may protect the soil while addressing the demand for other ecosystem services. Our emphasis is on the development of an approach to assess the impact of silvicultural practices and forest management models on soil erosion risks under climate change.
During floods, stream banks can often cave in. Preventing this by constructing walls along the banks or plant useful tree species will prevent this in the future and prevent soil loss down the stream. Earthworms provide great benefits of farmland due to the way they burrow under the ground and provide more are for water to rest after it has infiltrated the soil. When these worms excrete egesta, this sits in the soils and gives the crops many nutrients which are absorbed via the roots of the plants. Earthworm casts contain a vast amount more nutrients than any natural soil in the world, and for that reason should be invited into the soils of farmland to help prevent erosion and will lead to larger crop yields.