Soil losses and runoff variabilities in varieties of surface coverages

Soil erosion is a natural phenomenon of a landscape system. However, its occurrence has become a threat to the environment and human welfare when populations and human needs increase, especially in agriculture. Erosion can lead to soil deprivation and reduction of soil fertility that resulted in the decline of agricultural productivity and loss of arable land. Complex processes of soil erosion due to detachment, transport, and deposition, strictly depend on climatic, topographic, and biotic factors. Erosion can be worsened by extreme climate, that lately overrides, as the key-geomorphological process of erosion. Therefore, this research is aimed to understand how biotic factors such as different surface coverages can affect erosion within marginal agricultural soil. This study developed a small-scale erosion simulator with erosion pans and rain simulator. Standard small size erosion pan with width x length x depth of 32 x 45 x 20 cm and slope of 10 was used to simulate the erosion processes. Two erosion pans were planted with peanut (Arachis hypogaea) and shallot (Allium cepa var. Aggregatum). Furthermore, the other two were covered by litter and bare soil. Rain simulator was installed in 3 m of height and produced approximately 160 mm/hr of rain. Runoff water and eroded soil were collected and analyzed to find the amount of soil and water losses. From this experiment, it has shown that our proposed small-scale erosion simulator effectively demonstrates erosion and water runoff. This study found that soil erosion rates among plots were highly variable associated with the type of surface coverage. Variabilities soil coverage decrease the impact of raindrop and soil detachment. © Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd.