Quantification of long-term erosion rates from root exposure/tree age relationships in an alpine meadow catchment

Abstract

Erosion rates derived using dendrogeomorphology have been used to quantify slope degradation in many localities globally. However, with the exception of the western United States, most of these estimates are derived from short-lived trees whose lifetimes may not adequately reflect the complete range of slope processes which can include erosion, deposition, impacts of extreme events and even long-term hiatuses. Erosion rate estimates at a given site using standard techniques therefore reflect censored local point erosion estimates rather than long-term rates. We applied a modified dendrogeomorphic approach to rapidly estimate erosion rates from dbh/age relationships to assess the difference between short and long-term rates and found that the mean short-term rate was ~0.13cm/yr with high variability, while the uncensored long-term rate was ~0.06cm/yr. The results indicate that rates calculated from short-lived trees, while possibly appropriate for local short-term point estimates of erosion, are highly variable and may overestimate regional long-term rates by >50%. While these findings do not invalidate the use of dendrogeomorphology to estimate erosion rates they do suggest that care must be taken to select older trees that incorporate a range of slope histories in order to best approximate regional long-term rates.