Abstract
The stability and erosion of natural and man-made slopes is influenced by soil-vegetation-atmosphere interactions and the thermo-hydro-mechanical slope conditions. Understanding such interactions at the source of slope mass-wasting is important to develop land-use planning strategy and to promote environmentally adapted mitigation strategies, such as the use of vegetation to stabilize slopes and control erosion. Monitoring is essential for calibrating and validating models and for better comprehending the physical mechanisms of soil-vegetation-atmosphere interactions. We approached this complex problem by means of an experimental work in a full-scale monitored embankment, which is divided into four instrumented partitions. These partitions are North or South-faced and present a bare and vegetation cover at each orientation. Our main findings show that vegetation enhances rainfall infiltration and decreases runoff, which reduces slope stability and surficial erosion, while plant transpiration induces higher suctions and hence slope stability. Concerning thermal aspects, vegetation reduces the incidence of net solar radiation and consequently heat flux. Thus, daily temperature fluctuations and evaporation decreases. However, the effect of vegetation in the development of dryer soil conditions is more significant than the orientation effect, presenting higher drying rates and states at the North-vegetated slope compared to the South-bare slope.
Highlights
Slope mass-wasting induced by erosion and slope failures has become, in the past decade, one of the most important environmental problems in present and forthcoming semi-arid regions [1]
One of the main mechanisms pointed out as responsible of the triggering of slope failures is the reduction of soil shear strength due to increase in pore water pressure during heavy rainfall [6,7,8,9,10]
The embankment is 18 m long, 12 m wide, 2.5 m high and has 3H:2V slopes (34 degrees); it consists of four instrumented partitions with different slope orientations and covers: North not Vegetated (NnV), North Vegetated (NV), South not Vegetated (SnV) and
Summary
Slope mass-wasting induced by erosion and slope failures has become, in the past decade, one of the most important environmental problems in present and forthcoming semi-arid regions [1]. This geomorphological process has many direct and indirect socioeconomic consequences such as loss of agricultural and forest lands, reduction of reservoir capacity by sedimentation, damage to infrastructures and hazard related fatalities [2,3,4,5]. There is a strong concern about the effect of the current climate change on slope mass-wasting, since recent studies have shown increases of extreme precipitation events after more intense droughts [11,12,13,14]
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