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Abstract
The Upper Yangtze River Basin comprises a densely-populated agricultural region with mountainous and hilly landforms. Intensive cultivation has been extended onto steep hillslopes, which constitute the principal source area for sediment production. Soil conservation on sloping arable lands is thus of utmost priority for persisting sustainable agricultural production and maintaining sound ecosystem services. Although there have been many soil conservation techniques, either promoted by the government or adopted by local farmers, the practiced area was very limited relative to the total area affected by soil erosion. This paper attempts to introduce four popular soil conservation measures on sloping arable lands in this region to enhance a broader scale of implementation, including hedgerow buffers, level trenches, sloping terraces and limited downslope tillage. These practices, although developed from local farmers’ indigenous knowledge for productive purposes, have well conformed to our contemporary understanding of soil erosion processes on sloping landscape affected by human disturbances, were of sound suitability to regional manual tillage agriculture and more trade-off-efficient on rill prevention, runoff harvest and nutrient management.
Highlights
Global soil erosion has been greatly accelerated during the past centuries by the expansion and intensification of diverse human activities [1,2,3]
We focused on four soil conservation measures on sloping arable lands in this region due to their popularity
The project mainly focused on the four regions characterized by severe upland soil erosion and high fluvial suspended sediment yields
Summary
Global soil erosion has been greatly accelerated during the past centuries by the expansion and intensification of diverse human activities (e.g., land use change associated with agriculture expansion, land clearance and deforestation, mining, infrastructure construction, urbanization, etc.) [1,2,3]. In agricultural regions with a dense population, soil erosion rates are extremely high on agricultural lands due to intensive anthropogenic disturbances (e.g., land reclamation, grazing and tillage) [6]. Upland soil erosion and in-stream sediment redistribution can lead to a series of on-site problems, such as fertility depletion, land degradation and productivity reduction, and off-site environmental consequences, such as extreme floods, channel siltation, freshwater deterioration and aquatic habitat degradation. The Upper Yangtze River Basin in southwestern China comprises a densely-populated agricultural region with hilly and mountainous landforms. This region is affected by the many environmental and socioeconomic problems associated with severe soil erosion and high fluvial suspended sediment flux
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