Trend of Soil Erosion Processes within the Southern Half of the Russian Plain for the Last Decades

Abstract

© Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd. Complex approach is applied for assessment of recent trends of sheet, rill and gully erosion in different landscape zones of study area. Investigation is undertaken in 6 selected sectors (area of each transect is about 6-10 thousand km2), uniformly distributed over the area of the Russian Plain. Changes of the different factors, including some meteorological and hydrological parameters, land use change, USLE C-factor, were determined for the period 1980-2015. A set of field methods was used for quantification of sediment redistribution rates for the key small catchments. It was found that erosion rate decreased in forest and forest-steppe zone. Gully density decreases considerably in all landscape zones. The reduction of surface runoff from cultivated slope during snow-melting is the main reason of decreasing of sheet, rill and gully erosion rates in the forest, forest steppe and the north of steppe landscape zones. Increasing the proportion of perennial grasses in crop-rotation is the other factor of serious reduction of erosion processes in the forest zone.