Assessing the impacts of climatic and, in particular, land use changes on rates of soil erosion by water is the objective of many national and international research projects. However, over the last decades, most research dealing with soil erosion by water has concentrated on sheet (interrill) and rill erosion processes operating at the (runoff) plot scale. Relatively few studies have been conducted on gully erosion operating at larger spatial scales. Recent studies indicate that (1) gully erosion represents an important sediment source in a range of environments and (2) gullies are effective links for transferring runoff and sediment from uplands to valley bottoms and permanent channels where they aggravate off site effects of water erosion. In other words, once gullies develop, they increase the connectivity in the landscape. Many cases of damage (sediment and chemical) to watercourses and properties by runoff from agricultural land relate to (ephemeral) gullying. Consequently, there is a need for monitoring, experimental and modelling studies of gully erosion as a basis for predicting the effects of environmental change (climatic and land use changes) on gully erosion rates. In this respect, various research questions can be identified. The most important ones are: (1) What is the contribution of gully erosion to overall soil loss and sediment production at various temporal and spatial scales and under different climatic and land use conditions? (2) What are appropriate measuring techniques for monitoring and experimental studies of the initiation and development of various gully types at various temporal and spatial scales? (3) Can we identify critical thresholds for the initiation, development and infilling of gullies in different environments in terms of flow hydraulics, rain, topography, soils and land use? (4) How does gully erosion interact with hydrological processes as well as with other soil degradation processes? (5) What are appropriate models of gully erosion, capable of predicting (a) erosion rates at various temporal and spatial scales and (b) the impact of gully development on hydrology, sediment yield and landscape evolution? (6) What are efficient gully prevention and gully control measures? What can be learned from failures and successes of gully erosion control programmes? These questions need to be answered first if we want to improve our insights into the impacts of environmental change on gully erosion. This paper highlights some of these issues by reviewing recent examples taken from various environments.

Gully erosion and environmental change: importance and research needs

An Atlas of Past and Present Pollen Maps for Europe: 0-13000 Years Ago, and The Overlay Maps.

Aim This paper presents a tool for long-term global change studies; it is an update of the History Database of the Global Environment (HYDE) with estimates of some of the underlying demographic and agricultural driving factors.

Methods  Historical population, cropland and pasture statistics are combined with satellite information and specific allocation algorithms (which change over time) to create spatially explicit maps, which are fully consistent on a 5′ longitude/latitude grid resolution, and cover the period 10,000 bc to ad 2000.

Results  Cropland occupied roughly less than 1% of the global ice-free land area for a long time until ad 1000, similar to the area used for pasture. In the centuries that followed, the share of global cropland increased to 2% in ad 1700 (c. 3 million km2) and 11% in ad 2000 (15 million km2), while the share of pasture area grew from 2% in ad 1700 to 24% in ad 2000 (34 million km2) These profound land-use changes have had, and will continue to have, quite considerable consequences for global biogeochemical cycles, and subsequently global climate change.

Main conclusions  Some researchers suggest that humans have shifted from living in the Holocene (emergence of agriculture) into the Anthropocene (humans capable of changing the Earth's atmosphere) since the start of the Industrial Revolution. But in the light of the sheer size and magnitude of some historical land-use changes (e.g. as result of the depopulation of Europe due to the Black Death in the 14th century and the aftermath of the colonization of the Americas in the 16th century) we believe that this point might have occurred earlier in time. While there are still many uncertainties and gaps in our knowledge about the importance of land use (change) in the global biogeochemical cycle, we hope that this database can help global (climate) change modellers to close parts of this gap.

The HYDE 3.1 spatially explicit database of human‐induced global land‐use change over the past 12,000 years

Foreword 1. Introduction 2. Runoff, erosion and delivery to the coastal ocean 3. Temporal variations 4. Human impacts Appendices. Global River Database: Appendix A: North and Central America Appendix B: South America Appendix C: Europe Appendix D: Africa Appendix E: Eurasia Appendix F: Asia Appendix G: Oceania References Index.

/pdf/river-discharge-to-the-coastal-ocean-a-global-synthesis-571z1g19ts.pdf

River Discharge to the Coastal Ocean: A Global Synthesis

Gully erosion attracts increasing attention from scientists as reflected by two recent international meetings [Poesen and Valentin (Eds.), Catena 50 (2–4), 87–564; Li et al., 2004. Gully Erosion Under Global Change. Sichuan Science Technology Press, Chengu, China, 354 pp.]. This growing interest is associated with the increasing concern over off-site impacts caused by soil erosion at larger spatial scales than the cultivated plots. The objective of this paper is to review recent studies on impacts, factors and control of gully erosion and update the review on dgully erosion and environmental change: importance and research needsT [Poesen et al., 2003. Catena 50 (2–4), 91–134.]. For the farmers, the development of gullies leads to a loss of crop yields and available land as well as an increase of workload (i.e. labour necessary to cultivate the land). Gullies can also change the mosaic patterns between fallow and cultivated fields, enhancing hillslope erosion in a feedback loop. In addition, gullies tend to enhance drainage and accelerate aridification processes in the semi-arid zones. Fingerprinting the origin of sediments within catchments to determine the relative contributions of potential sediment sources has become essential to identify sources of potential pollution and to develop management strategies to combat soil erosion. In this respect, tracers such as carbon, nitrogen, the nuclear bomb-derived radionuclide 137 Cs, magnetics and the strontium isotopic ratio are increasingly used to fingerprint sediment. Recent studies conducted in Australia, China, Ethiopia and USA showed that the major part of the sediment in reservoirs might have come from gully erosion. Gullies not only occur in marly badlands and mountainous or hilly regions but also more globally in soils subjected to soil crusting such as loess (European belt, Chinese Loess Plateau, North America) and sandy soils (Sahelian zone, north-east Thailand) or in soils prone to piping and tunnelling such as dispersive soils. Most of the time, the gullying processes are triggered by

Gully erosion: Impacts, factors and control

Historical soil erosion by water in Germany: Scales and archives, chronology, research perspectives

The Rhine river system can look back on a long history of human impact. Whereas significant anthropogenic changes to the river channel started only 200 years ago, the impacts of land use have been felt for more than 7500 years. Here, we review results from several case studies and show how land-use change and climate impacts have transformed the fluvial system. We focus on changes in sediment delivery pathways and slope–channel coupling, and show that these vary in time and depend on the magnitude of a rainfall event. These changes must be accounted for when trying to use sediments as archives of land-use change and climatic impacts on fluvial systems. For example, human impact is recorded in slope deposits only as long as rainfall intensity and runoff generation do not exceed the threshold for gullying. Similarly, climatic impacts are only recorded in alluvium when both the landscape is rendered sensitive by human activities (e.g. deforestation) and rainfall thresholds for gullying are exceeded. Copyright  2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Changes in sediment flux and storage within a fluvial system: some examples from the Rhine catchment

Landschaftsentwicklung in Mitteleuropa

Landschaftsentwicklung in Mitteleuropa : Wirkungen des Menschen auf Landschaften

This paper presents the results of 40 years of research on the gully system in the Doly Podmularskie catchment (0.35 km² in size), which is situated in the south-western part of the loess-covered Naleczow Plateau in SE-Poland. Topographic, stratigraphic and pedologic investigations, and monitoring of a tributary gully (gully area: 0.7 ha, catchment: 2.5 ha) were combined with historical, archaeological and palaeoecological records. The results reveal a long and complex history in terms of the temporal and spatial extent and the impact of land use on gully erosion, and the long-term feed-back mechanisms between land use changes and natural processes since the end of the Pleistocene. Phases of gully erosion and subsequent filling occurred in the Bronze Age and around the 10th to 11th centuries. The most severe deepening and expansion of the gully took place in the 17th century. The results also show that field structures and land use intensity had a significant influence on the frequency and magnitude of run-off, soil erosion, piping, and landslide events. The last significant erosion phase started in the mid-19th century with renewed headward retreat and down-cutting within older gully fills. Today, most of the catchment is either forested or the land is covered in berry shrubs. In the future, the area will continue to produce sediments, because of the steep slopes and because there are still areas of bare soil with a low resistance to erosion, a legacy from past land uses, which will remain a factor affecting soil erosion and sedimentation processes in the future. This study is an example of how important it is to observe and understand slow geomorphologic processes and rare extreme events in the light of land use changes when investigating long-term human–environment interactions.

High resolution gully erosion and sedimentation processes, and land use changes since the Bronze Age and future trajectories in the Kazimierz Dolny area (Nałęczów Plateau, SE-Poland)

Hans-Rudolf Bork

Papers

Historical soil erosion by water in Germany: Scales and archives, chronology, research perspectives

Changes in sediment flux and storage within a fluvial system: some examples from the Rhine catchment

Landschaftsentwicklung in Mitteleuropa

Landschaftsentwicklung in Mitteleuropa : Wirkungen des Menschen auf Landschaften

High resolution gully erosion and sedimentation processes, and land use changes since the Bronze Age and future trajectories in the Kazimierz Dolny area (Nałęczów Plateau, SE-Poland)