Obtaining Quality Soil Erosion Field Data for Soil and Water Conservation Research.

The lack of quality soil erosion field data, which is required for the verification and calibration of soil erosion models, is one of the most serious problems and challenges facing soil and water conservation research today. The root of this problem stems from the fact that the current soil erosion monitoring techniques are either obstructing the natural runoff pattern of a field (e.g. the runoff-plot method) or not sensitive enough for short-term, e.g., one or several erosion events, experiments (e.g., erosion pin and radio-nuclides methods). As a consequence, shortage of quality soil erosion field data hinders the advance of soil and water conservation research today.  In order to fill this gap in soil erosion research, I propose an alternative field approach based on the principle of a mesh-bag (MB) method. The MB method has been introduced since 1992 but hasn’t been widely applied, probably due to misunderstanding or overlooking of the principle. The MB method was designed to quantify soil and nutrient redistribution in a field without disturbing the runoff pattern. In this report, I will show how the MB method can applied to quantify soil and nutrient redistribution and soil loss from a given field with sensitivity and simplicity. This study was carried out on the 68-ha Mears Farm at Grand Ridge, FL. The study shows that 1) the amount of soil redistributed on a field is far greater than the soil loss from the field and 2) the amounts of soil redistributed in a field and soil lost from a field are positively correlated: implying that soil loss can be predicted from soil redistribution, if the relationship can be identified given characteristic erosion factors and the size of the field.