Excerpt
Wherever soil is cultivated, a displacement of the tilled layer takes place (Lindstrom et al. 1992; Govers et al. 1994, Van Oost and Govers 2006). The term “tillage erosion” is used to indicate when the soil translocation produces a net soil loss or a net soil accumulation locally. Tillage erosion is a gravity-driven process and is influenced mainly by slope gradient, depth of tillage, speed of tillage, type of tillage tools used, and direction of tillage with respect the slope gradient (Van Oost and Govers 2006). In the last 15 years, a large set of studies has been conducted in various parts of the world with the aim to quantify and model this process (Van Oost and Govers 2006).
One of the results of the TERON project, funded by European Union in the period 1997 to 2000, has been the Soil Erosion by Tillage (SETi) model (Torri and Borselli 2002). SETi is a deterministic tillage soil translocation model that simulates the three-dimensional behavior of soil during tillage. It takes into account explicitly the interaction between tillage tool and soil in three phases: (1) drag, when the soil is in contact with instrument; (2) jump, when the …
Footnotes
Lorenzo Borselli is a researcher and Dino Torri is research director at the Institute for Geo-Hydrological Protection, National Research Council, Firenze, Italy.
- Copyright 2007 by the Soil and Water Conservation Society
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