Evaluation of soil loss tolerance via soil productivity and quality at a watershed scale: Haji-Ghushan watershed, Golestan province

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

1 university of tehran

2 University of Tehran

3 Soil Conservation and Watershed Management Research Institute

4 Agricultural researches Institute of Golestan

Abstract

Erosion is known as one of the important factors in the degradation of soil resources and non-point pollutions. A wide range of damaging effects including social, economic and environmental problems occur when soil erosion rate goes beyond the allowable value. There are several methods to determine soil  erosion tolerance and each one has specific advantages and limitations. In this paper, two widely used methods were compared to determine the tolerable erosion in a watershed scale. The first approach is based on the assessment of the Productivity Index (PI) and the second approach is based on soil depth and soil quality index. A particular minimum data set of soil properties including infiltration, water capacity, organic carbon, aggregate stability, bulk density, and fertility status (nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium) were used to calculate the criteria. The results showed that the calculated tolerable erosion by the two methods were closely related. The average tolerable soil erosion for the study area was determined 9.2 and 10.2 ton/ha/year based on soil productivity method and soil depth-quality approach, respectively. The PI-based approach is preferred over the soil depth-quality approach for two reasons: First, the PI-based approach is a depth-wise and chemo-physical properties of topsoil are compared with subsoil layers. Second, the soil depth-quality based approach is a general guide that cannot take the differences between soils into account in details. As both models just take the onsite effects of erosion into account, these values can be used for managers and decision-makers of soil conservation regardless off offsite impacts.

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Main Subjects

References

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Iranian Journal of Soil and Water Research
Volume 48, Issue 5
January 2018
Pages 985-994

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