All about erosion, a full guide? What is soil erosion and soil degradation? Although soil erosion is a natural process, human activities over the past decades have greatly accelerated it. In fact, according to the UNESCO, land degradation is undermining the well-being of two-fifths of humanity, driving species extinct and intensifying climate change. According to a senior UN official, all of the world’s topsoil could be gone within 60 years.
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.
In rivers and estuaries, the erosion of banks is caused by the scouring action of the moving water, particularly in times of flood and, in the case of estuaries, also by the tidal flow on the ebb tide when river and tidewater combine in their erosive action. This scouring action of the moving water entrains (that is, draws in and transports) sediments within the river or stream load. These entrained sediments become instruments of erosion as they abrade one another in suspended transport or as they abrade other rock and soil as they are dragged along the river bottom, progressively entraining additional sediments as long as the river’s volume and velocity of the stream continues to increase. As the velocity of the river decreases, the suspended sediments will be deposited, creating landforms such as broad alluvial fans, floodplains, sandbars, and river deltas. The land surface unaffected by rivers and streams is subjected to a continuous process of erosion by the action of rain, snowmelt, and frost, the resulting detritus (organic debris) and sediment being carried into the rivers and thence to the ocean. See additional info at https://ippio.com/what-is-erosion-a-comprehensive-guide-to-study-erosion/ guide.
The cover-management factor (C-factor) within the Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation (RUSLE) is used as an indicator of soil protection by different land-uses and management options (Renard et al. 1991). Yet, few studies have addressed its potential as a dynamic tool for erosion control (Panagos et al. 2015b). Experimentally determined values for the C-factor for most land uses and management systems are easily found in the literature (e.g., Pimenta 1998a). Moreover, both remote sensing and geographical information systems (GIS) techniques can be efficiently used to estimate the C-factor at landscape level (Wang et al. 2003; Lu et al. 2004; Durigon et al. 2014). Nevertheless, the literature does not report the use of the C-factor to address impacts of vegetation density changes over time under the same land use or management type. This provided the motivation for this research.
Why Is Erosion Control Important? Without erosion control, your topsoil may lose its ability to hold nutrients, regulate water flow, and combat pollutants. In addition to affecting the ecosystem of nearby wildlife, residential properties and transportation systems can suffer long term damage. To combat the environmental problem of both erosion and sedimentation, certain methods must be practiced by construction companies.
