Everything on erosion, a full guide? The most effective way of minimizing erosion is to guarantee a permanent surface cover on the soil surface, such as trees, pasture, or meadow. However, compared to original forest soils, soils in pasture fields and croplands have less capacity to hold up and are more susceptible to erosion. These soils also have less capacity to absorb water, which makes flooding (and its economic, social, and environmental impacts) more common. The increasingly high demand of a growing population for commodities such as coffee, soybean, palm oil or wheat is clearing land for agriculture. Unfortunately, clearing autochthonous trees and replacing them with new tree crops that don’t necessarily hold onto the soil increases the risks of soil erosion. With time, as topsoil (the most nutrient-rich part of the soil) is lost, putting agriculture under threat.

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.

Erosion, therefore, includes the transportation of eroded or weathered material from the point of degradation (such as the side of a mountain or other landform) but not the deposition of material at a new site. The complementary actions of erosion and deposition or sedimentation operate through the geomorphic processes of wind, moving water, and ice to alter existing landforms and create new landforms. See extra information on what is erosion wiki.

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.

Terracing is a method of carving multiple, flat leveled areas into hills. Steps are formed by the terraces which are surrounded by a mud wall to prevent runoff and hold the soil nutrients in the beds. More commonly found in lesser developed nations due to the difficulty of using mechanized farming equipment in the terraces. Very popular in Asia for planting rice. A more enhanced version of Contour Plowing, maximum water retention is achieved by taking into account all the watershed properties when making the contour lines. The Keyline refers to topographic features linked to water flow. This allows the water to run off to run directly into an existing water channel, and prevent soil erosion caused by the water.