Objective
To contribute towards a better understanding of the full spectrum
of erosional effects associated with desertification in the
Mediterranean, through the quantification of hydrological and
erosional processes on currently productive land with a high
erosion risk.
To identify the most appropriate and least damaging land
management practices in the study areas and assess their wider
applicability to other Mediterranean climatic-edaphic zones.
The basis of the work will be to investigate the hydrological
budgets and the erosional impact of existing and alternative land
management treatments in two constrasting climatic forested areas
affected by fire in Portugal (standard-size plots) and in a
deeply-gullied area in Spain (plots and small catchment scale).
At the plot level, monitoring covering two wet seasons will be
carried out of runoff, soil losss and changes in soil moisture
measured by Time Domain Reflectometry (TDR) and with
tensiometers in natural and simulated rainfall events. Selected
properties under different land management practices (e.g soil
hydraulic conductivity, texture, aggregate stability, chemical
properties, soil micromorphology using resinated thin section,
scanning electron microscopy and image analysing computer) will
be determined to assess the effects of ground disturbance and
antropogenic influences on the soil. Where appropriate,
laboratory analysis of rainsplash erosion and Caesium 137
analysis in the field will be carried out.
Results are expected to identify appropriate land
management practices and to assess their widder applicability
to other Mediterranean climatic-edaphic regions.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- engineering and technologyenvironmental engineeringnatural resources managementland management
- natural sciencesphysical sciencesopticsmicroscopyelectron microscopy
- social scienceseconomics and businessbusiness and management
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Call for proposal
Data not availableFunding Scheme
CSC - Cost-sharing contractsCoordinator
3810-193 AVEIRO/EIXO
Portugal