Role of groundcover management in controlling soil erosion under extreme rainfall in citrus orchards of southern China

Abstract

Extreme rainfall is becoming more frequent and intense due to climate change and increasing human activity. Changes in rainfall will increase the risks and uncertainty of water erosion from orchards. Groundcover management is an important factor affecting hydrological and erosive processes of orchards. However, the roles of different groundcover managements for controlling soil water erosion caused by extreme rainfall are not fully understood. In this study, four groundcover managements (i.e., control bare land, orchard with no cover, orchard with grass cover and orchard with cover crops) were used to analyze runoff and erosion characteristics related to extreme and ordinary rainfalls in the red soil region of China. Based on the rainfall-runoff data measured on runoff plots, 356 natural rainfall events from 2001 to 2012 were analyzed, and rainfall depths and maximum 30-min rainfall intensities were used to select extreme rainfall events, according to the criteria of the World Meteorological Organization for extreme rainfall. There were 25 extreme rainfall events with a probability of 7.0% during the study period. Extreme rainfall events played the destructive role in inducing soil loss. The average extreme runoff coefficient and soil loss amount were 2.8 and 11.1 times higher than the values from ordinary rainfall, respectively. The contribution of extreme rainfall to sediment yield was 44.2%, which far higher than those to runoff generation (15.8%). Moreover, the runoff coefficients and erosion amounts varied greatly among the different groundcover managements under extreme rainfall, and were ranked in the following order: control bare land > orchard with no cover > orchard with cover crops > orchard with grass cover. However, the highest percentage of soil loss amount caused by extreme rainfalls were 59.0% in orchard with cover crops, and the lowest in orchard with grass cover (26.0%). Therefore, extreme rainfall should cause more attention in improving the groundcover management strategy for orchard soil erosion control, and groundcover like grass cover was extremely needed even after interplanting crops for the serious soil loss.