What is erosion plus erosion control guides? Overgrazing is caused by intensive cattle raising. As plants don’t have the recovery period they need, they end up being crushed and compacted by cattle. In this process, topsoil sediments are transported elsewhere. As for the remaining soil, it can lose its infiltration capacity, which means more water getting lost from the ecosystem and a harder time for new plants to grow. The use of chemicals under the form of pesticides and fertilizers on (often) monocultural crops is a very usual way of helping farmers improve their yields. However, the excessive use of phosphoric chemicals ends up causing an imbalance of microorganisms in the soil moisture, stimulating the growth of harmful bacteria. As the soil gets degraded, the risk of erosion increases and the sediments sweep (via the actions of water and wind) into rivers and nearby regions, possibly contaminating nearby ecosystems.

Water is nature’s most versatile tool. For example, take rain on a frigid day. The water pools in cracks and crevices. Then, at night, the temperature drops and the water expands as it turns to ice, splitting the rock like a sledgehammer to a wedge. The next day, under the beating sun, the ice melts and trickles the cracked fragments away. Repeated swings in temperature can also weaken and eventually fragment rock, which expands when hot and shrinks when cold. Such pulsing slowly turns stones in the arid desert to sand. Likewise, constant cycles from wet to dry will crumble clay.

The broadest application of the term erosion embraces the general wearing down and molding of all landforms on Earth’s surface, including the weathering of rock in its original position, the transport of weathered material, and erosion caused by wind action and fluvial, marine, and glacial processes. This broad definition is more correctly called denudation, or degradation, and includes mass-movement processes. A narrow and somewhat limiting definition of erosion excludes the transport of eroded material by natural agencies, but the exclusion of the transport phenomenon makes the distinction between erosion and weathering very vague. See even more details at what is erosion guide.

Water-related forest ecosystem services include the provision, filtration and regulation of water, along with stream ecosystem support and water-related hazards control, e.g., soil protection from erosion and runoff (Bredemeier 2011). In this context, forest management practices that involve vegetation cover modifications may have a substantial impact on the provision of water-related ecosystem services (Ellison et al. 2012; Panagos et al. 2015b). Moreover, forest ecosystems interactions with water and energy cycles have been highlighted as the foundations for carbon storage, water resources distribution and terrestrial temperature balancing. Forest management may thus play a key role to meet climate change mitigation goals (Ellison et al. 2017).

Planting grass in heavily eroded areas is called an agrostological measure. Ley farming practices cultivating grass in rotation with regular crops to increase the nutrient level in the soils. When the grass is harvested it can be used as fodder for cattle. For heavily eroded soil it is recommended to grown grass for many years to let the soils naturally repair themselves. This is the method of growing crops year-round without changing the topography of the soil by tilling or contouring. This technique increases the amount of water that penetrates the soil and can increase organic matter of the soil which leads to larger yields.