Davood Davoodi Moghadam; Seyed Hamidreza Sadeghi; Mahmood Azami Rad
Abstract
Introduction: It is vital to control land degradation, for conserving precious natural treasures. Quantification of runoff production and soil and nutrient loss from wild lands under different managerial systems is one of the scientific and optimal management in agriculture and natural resources, as ...
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Introduction: It is vital to control land degradation, for conserving precious natural treasures. Quantification of runoff production and soil and nutrient loss from wild lands under different managerial systems is one of the scientific and optimal management in agriculture and natural resources, as a major component of sustainable development. Many researches have been conducted to assess the effects of different land uses on soil erosion and runoff generation throughout the globe. Most of which, mainly verified the detrimental effects of human intervention on land degradation. However, limited comprehensive and comparative studies have been conducted to consider the amount of surface runoff generation, and soil and nutrient loss from watersheds with different management patterns viz. untreated and treated small watersheds.
Materials and Methods: The present study aimed to compare surface runoff generation,soil and nutrient loss in Kakhk treated and untreated watersheds with an area ca. 222 ha and precipitation of some 243 mm per annum. Other physical and geological characteristics of the paired watersheds were also similar to allow assessing the effects of study measures on soil, water and nutrient losses. The area under consideration has been located in Khorasan Razavi Province in northeastern Iran. The present study was performed in plots with standard size of 22.1 × 1.8 m in treating and representative areas, with three replicates and on the storm basis occurred during early 2011 and mid-2014. The treated plots were covered by biological measures viz. seeding, bunching and exclusre. The study plots have been situated on eastern,western and northern aspects with respective slope of 55, 40 and 40 %. The entire runoff from study plots were collected in a container in 0.5×1×1 m. The sediment concentration was also measured in 2-liter samples taken from the container after a complete mixing of the entire collected runoff. The sample was treated by decantation technique, oven dried and weighted by high precision scale. The transported elements, i.e. potassium, phosphorous and nitrogen were also measured in solute and particulate forms. Ultimately, the data bank was developed in Excel 2010 and got ready to be processed in SPSS 19.0 software package and statistically compared with the help of analysis of variance (ANOVA) test.
Results and Discussion: The results showed that the soil loss, nitrogen concentration, potassium concentration and sediment concentration had significant difference (p
