Soil erosion and sediment transport under different land use/land cover scenarios

1 página.-- Introducción completa en resumen.

The papers in this special issue of Catena are a selection of those presented at the Sections 6 and 7 of the 6th International Conference on Geomorphology, held in Zaragoza (Spain) from September 6 to 11, 2005. This Conference joined almost 1000 geomorphologists, many of them working on “border” topics, and therefore contributing to the advance of Geomorphology as a key science to understand the complex evolution and dynamics of landforms, and the interactions between past and present climate changes, land use changes, lithology, geological structure and tectonics. The papers presented at the Conference gave an excellent overview about the contribution of Geomorphology in different fields such as, among others, natural hazards, soil erosion, sediment transport, mass movements, extreme events, Global Change and environmental stress, and their relationships with land management. Sections 6 and 7 were devoted to Hillslope Processes and Soil erosion, respectively. Both sessions were among the most attended of the Conference in number of papers presented and participants, confirming an increasing interest in the study of land degradation, sediment transport and mass movements at different spatial and temporal scales. New experimental, field and laboratory methods, detailed field observations and measurements, and the use of models to explain and predict geomorphic processes were common to many of the papers. Particularly, as previous issues of Catena and other international journals demonstrated, Global Change is present in almost all of the papers dealing on soil erosion and hillslope processes. How would it be possible to explain the characteristics of infiltration, rill, interril and gully erosion, sediment transport and river morphology, or the triggering of different mass movements without any reference to climate and land use changes? Most geomorphic processes are governed by temperature oscillations, the magnitude-frequency of rainfalls and floods, or human activities such as deforestation and reforestation, soil cultivation on steep slopes, farmland abandonment, overgrazing, channelization, gravel mining and construction of dams. An increasing number of papers stressed the role of climate fluctuations and historical and present-day land management, and this is the best contribution the geomorphologists can do in order to not only understand the geomorphic processes, but especially to improve our unique and menaced world. The selection of papers included in this issue of Catena is particularly related to land use/land cover changes. These papers focus on (i) soil erosion processes (desertification, consequences of forest fires, factors controlling soil erosion, evaluation of denudation rates); (ii) gully development (vulnerable areas for gully erosion and gullies under forest canopy); and (iii) catchment studies (sediment transport, sediment delivery, relationships between streamflow and sediment load or simulation of badland erosion at catchment scale). The editors of this special issue wish to acknowledge the efforts made by all authors and particularly the reviewers for their anonymous and invaluable work.

Peer reviewed