Information
Level 4 Data summaries and links to related documents and reports
Key findings
Lang & McCaffrey (1984):
- Pasture cover was found to affect the frequency and magnitude of erosion, but it appeared to have little or no effect on the relative contribution to total soil loss of individual erosion events.
- Soil loss ranged from 10 kg. ha-1.yr-1 (complete ground cover) to 4 000kg. ha-1.yr-1
- A balance between soil loss and soil formation exists with 50 – 70% vegetative cover.
- Percentage ground cover affected both the frequency and amount of soil loss from the plots, and relatively few major events accounted for most of the soil lost from the plots.
Lang (1979):
- Increased amounts of ground cover resulted in curvilinear decreases in the average frequency of runoff, storm runoff yield, event depth and total average annual runoff.
- 75% ground cover was shown to be critical, above which runoff was slight, below which runoff increased rapidly.
Hamilton (1970):
- The removal of top-soil depressed wheat yields and brought about a decline in wheat quality. When 3 inches of soil was removed wheat yields dropped by 20 to 50% and protein percentage of the grain by 5 to 20%.