The effect of accelerated soil erosion on hillslope morphology

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2019-12-01

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Abstract

© 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Intensive agricultural land use can have detrimental effects on landscape properties, greatly accelerating soil erosion, with consequent fertility loss and reduced agricultural potential. To quantify the effects of such erosional processes on hillslope morphology and gain insight into the underlying dynamics, we use a twofold approach. First, a statistical analysis of topographical features is conducted, with a focus on slope and gradient distributions. The accelerated soil erosion is shown to be fingerprinted in the distribution tails, which provide a clear statistical signature of this human-induced land modification. Theoretical solutions are then derived for the hillslope morphology and the associated creep and runoff erosion fluxes, allowing us to distinguish between the main erosional mechanisms operating in disturbed and undisturbed areas. We focus our application on the landscape at the Calhoun Critical Zone Observatory in the US Southern Piedmont, where severe soil erosion followed intensive cotton cultivation, resulting in highly eroded and gullied hillslopes. The observed differences in hillslope morphologies in disturbed and undisturbed areas are shown to be related to the disruption of the natural balance between soil creep and runoff erosion. The relaxation time required for the disturbed hillslopes to reach a quasi-equilibrium condition is also investigated. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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10.1002/esp.4694

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Bonetti, S, DD Richter and A Porporato (2019). The effect of accelerated soil erosion on hillslope morphology. Earth Surface Processes and Landforms, 44(15). pp. 3007–3019. 10.1002/esp.4694 Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/21222.

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Scholars@Duke

Richter

Daniel D. Richter

Professor in the Division of Earth and Climate Science

Richter’s research and teaching links soils with ecosystems and the wider environment, most recently Earth scientists’ Critical Zone.  He focuses on how humanity is transforming Earth’s soils from natural to human-natural systems, specifically how land-uses alter soil processes and properties on time scales of decades, centuries, and millennia.  Richter's book, Understanding Soil Change (Cambridge University Press), co-authored with his former PhD student Daniel Markewitz (Professor at University of Georgia), explores a legacy of soil change across the Southern Piedmont of North America, from the acidic soils of primary hardwood forests that covered the region until 1800, through the marked transformations affected by long-cultivated cotton, to contemporary soils of rapidly growing and intensively managed pine forests.  Richter and colleagues work to expand the concept of soil as the full biogeochemical weathering system of the Earth’s crust, ie, the Earth’s belowground Critical Zone, which can be tens of meters deep.  The research examines decadal to millennial changes in the chemistry and cycling of soil C, N, P, Ca, K, Mg, and trace elements B, Fe, Mn, Cu, Be, Zr, and Zn across full soil profiles as deep at 30-m.  Since 1988, Richter has worked at and directed the Long-Term Calhoun Soil-Ecosystem Experiment (LTSE) in the Piedmont of South Carolina, a collaborative study with the USDA Forest Service that quantifies how soils form as natural bodies and are transformed by human action, and a study that has grown to become an international model for such long-term soil and ecosystem studies.  In 2005, Richter and students initiated the first comprehensive international inventory project of the world’s LTSEs, using an advanced-format website that has networked metadata from 250 LTSEs.  The LTSEs project has held three workshops at Duke University, NCSU's Center for Environmental Farming Systems, and the USDA Forest Service's Calhoun Experimental Forest and Coweeta Hydrologic Laboratory, hosting representatives from Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, and the Americas.  Richter's 60-year old Long Term Calhoun Soil and Ecosystem Experiment is linked to similar experiments and platforms around the world via the ‘Long-Term Soil-Ecosystem Experiments Global Inventory’, assembled by Dan Richter, Pete Smith, and Mike Hofmockel."He is an active member of the International Commission on Stratigraphy’s Working Group on the Anthropocene.  Richter has written in the peer-reviewed literature about all of these projects, and in November 2014 his soils research at the Calhoun and his soils teaching were featured in Science magazine.


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