Managing ditches for agroecological engineering of landscape. A review

Abstract

Agriculture must now feed the planet with the lowest environmental impact. Landscape management is a means to protect natural resources from the adverse impacts. In particular, the adequate management of ditches could improve crop quality. Here, we review ditch design and maintenance. We found the following major points: (1) ditch networks have been primarily designed for waterlogging control and erosion prevention. Nonetheless, when properly managed, farm ditches provide other important ecosystem services, namely groundwater recharge, flood attenuation, water purification, or biodiversity conservation. (2) All ditch ecosystem services depend on many geochemical, geophysical, and biological processes, whose occurrence and intensity vary largely with ditch characteristics. (3) The major ruling characteristics are vegetative cover; ditch morphology; slope orientation; reach connections such as piped sections and weirs, soil, sediment and litter properties, biota, and biofilms; and network topology. (4) Ditch maintenance is an efficient engineering tool to optimize ecosystem services because several ditch characteristics change widely with ditch maintenance. For instance, maintenance operations, dredging, chemical weeding, and burning improve waterlogging and soil erosion control, but they are negative for biodiversity conservation. Mowing has low adverse effects on biodiversity conservation and water purification when mowing is performed at an adequate season. The effects of burning have been poorly investigated.