Contribution of climate and land cover changes to reduction in soil erosion rates within small cultivated catchments in the eastern part of the Russian Plain during the last 60 years.

Contribution of climate and land cover changes to reduction in soil erosion rates within small cultivated catchments in the eastern part of the Russian Plain during the last 60 years. Environ Res. 2018 Jul 09;167:21-33 Authors: Gusarov AV, Golosov VN, Sharifullin AG Abstract The eastern part of the Russian Plain is an important agricultural region of European Russia with high proportion of cultivated lands in the steppe, forest-steppe and forest (southern part) landscape zones. Soil erosion is the main process of land degradation and surface water contamination there. Climate and land cover changes have been observed in this region during the last 30 years. However, field quantitative assessments of soil erosion rates are not available for the eastern part of European Russia due to the lack of monitoring data as well as the evaluation of erosion/deposition processes in cultivated catchments using other field methods. Three representative small cultivated catchments with high (> 80%) proportion of cultivated lands were selected in the forest (southern part), forest-steppe and steppe zones of the study region to evaluate sedimentation rates in dry valley bottoms of the catchments for two-time intervals (1963-1986 and 1987-2016) based on the application of the bomb-derived and Chernobyl-derived 137Cs isotope for sediment dating. The 3-4 depth 137Cs profiles were used to assess the sedimentation rates within the each investigated catc...
Source: Environmental Research - Category: Environmental Health Authors: Tags: Environ Res Source Type: research