All on erosion, a complete guide? Setting up buildings and roads also have their share of responsibility when it comes to soil erosion as they don’t allow for the normal circulation of water. Instead, it runs off to flood nearby lands, speeded up erosion in these areas. Moreover, motor-based activities such as motocross also have the potential to disturb ecosystems and change (even if at a smaller scale compared with other causes) and erode the soil. At the same time, tillage techniques (that turn over crops and forages) commonly used by farmers to prepare seedbeds by incorporating manure and fertilizers, leveling the soil and taking out invasive seeds also have a large impact. Because it fractures the soil’s structure, tillage ends up accelerating surface runoff and soil erosion.

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. Read extra details on erosion control website.

Water-related forest ecosystem services include the provision, filtration and regulation of water, along with stream ecosystem support and water-related hazards control, e.g., soil protection from erosion and runoff (Bredemeier 2011). In this context, forest management practices that involve vegetation cover modifications may have a substantial impact on the provision of water-related ecosystem services (Ellison et al. 2012; Panagos et al. 2015b). Moreover, forest ecosystems interactions with water and energy cycles have been highlighted as the foundations for carbon storage, water resources distribution and terrestrial temperature balancing. Forest management may thus play a key role to meet climate change mitigation goals (Ellison et al. 2017).

Planting grass in heavily eroded areas is called an agrostological measure. Ley farming practices cultivating grass in rotation with regular crops to increase the nutrient level in the soils. When the grass is harvested it can be used as fodder for cattle. For heavily eroded soil it is recommended to grown grass for many years to let the soils naturally repair themselves. This is the method of growing crops year-round without changing the topography of the soil by tilling or contouring. This technique increases the amount of water that penetrates the soil and can increase organic matter of the soil which leads to larger yields.