Abstract
Agriculture in Malaysia makes up to twelve percent of the nation’s GDP and is supplying one-third of the world rubber export. Ambitious agriculture demand increases the intensity of forest conversion which is driven to the soil erosion. Thus, this study is to measure and analyse the impact of forest conversion on soil erosion relate to some manipulated variables such as slope, bulk density, soil moisture, canopy openness and ground cover, where rainfall and soil type are constant within the sites. Two different land-uses of High Conservation Value Forest (HCVF) and Mature Rubber Plantation of Timber Latex Clone (MRP) were selected around Kelantan state, due to the high land conversion compared to the other states of West Malaysia. Ground height change was monitored by using Modified Laser Erosion Bridge (MLEB) in between 17 to 48 transects. The result found that the annual soil erosion rate was 76.12 t.ha-1.yr-1 for HCVF is higher compared to the MRP was 6.37 t.ha-1.yr-1. Terrace soil conservation technique is practiced for MRP helps in reducing soil movement resulted significant low erosion rate compared to the HCVF. The results indicate that even a relatively limited forest conversion can be assumed to have a significant effect on regional soil erosion rate.
Highlights
Soil erosion has become an important environmental problem around the world, especially in areas where the intensive use of lands for development
Total of 17 and 48 transects of Erosion Bridge were established in High Conservation Value Forest (HCVF) and Mature Rubber Plantation (MRP) respectively on slopes of 0°-50°
Based on the result presented in the bar graph, it clearly showed that the higher deposition occurred at the transect MRP-8 was +9.7mm compared to HCVF-10 was +6.7mm
Summary
Soil erosion has become an important environmental problem around the world, especially in areas where the intensive use of lands for development. The speeded soil erosion can either seen as the consequence of logging activities, the introduction of rubber plantation, tin mining activities or deforestation associated with land conversion for other purposes [1]. Rapid development of agricultural plantations in Malaysia has driven to increase forest conversion that leads to soil erosion process. Many researches have been studied on the effects of soil erosion around the world but these cases are still less focused and remain unclear in Malaysia, especially for forest conversion to rubber plantation [5,6,7]. The objective of this paper is to estimate the preliminary soil erosion rate in areas affected by forest conversion (ie: High Conservation Value Forest and Rubber Plantation). Analyse the impact of ecological factors of slope, bulk density, soil moisture, canopy and ground cover on soil erosion rate
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