All on erosion, a comprehensive guide

What is erosion plus erosion control guides? Soil erosion is a complex process that depends on soil properties, ground slope, vegetation, and rainfall amount and intensity. According to Montgomery, modifications in land use are one of the most impactful ways of accelerating soil erosion. These changes then have a cascade effect as the loss of fertile topsoil cover sends millions of tons of sediments into lakes and reservoirs, changing ecosystems and impacting agricultural production and water quality. This has been the case with the Bo River in Vietnam. Despite these types of soil erosion, as we have briefly mentioned above, if it wasn’t for human activities, today’s soils would be less susceptible to erosion and more resilient. What are the human causes behind soil erosion then?

Every year, rivers deposit millions of tons of sediment into the oceans. Without the erosive forces of water, wind, and ice, rock debris would simply pile up where it forms and obscure from view nature’s weathered sculptures. Although erosion is a natural process, abusive land-use practices such as deforestation and overgrazing can expedite erosion and strip the land of soils needed for food to grow.

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. See extra info at erosion control website.

Soil erosion by water is linked to desertification processes. Its severity is prone to increase as a consequence of changes in the amount of precipitation as well as in its temporal and spatial distribution under prospective climate scenarios (IPCC 2014a). This will exert further pressure on ecosystems water balance and calls thus for adequate soil protection and conservation practices in the framework of ecosystems management (Coutinho and Antunes 2006; Jones et al. 2011; Panagos et al. 2015b, 2015c; Anaya-Romero et al. 2016; Seidl et al. 2016).

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.