Marcella Biddoccu, National Research Council (CNR), Italy. Global Symposium on Soil Erosion (GSER19), 15 - 17 May 2019 at FAO HQ.

1. Evaluation of soil erosion risk and
identification of soil cover and management
factor (C) for RUSLE in European vineyards
with different soil management
Biddoccu, M.*1, Guzmán, G.2, Thielke, T.3, Strauss, P.3, Winter, S.4, Zaller, J.G.,5,
Capello G. 1, Cavallo, E.1,Gómez, J.A.6 1CNR - IMAMOTER, Torino, Italy, 2University of
Cordoba, Physics Department, Cordoba, Spain, 3BAW, Institute for Land and Water
Management Research, Petzenkirchen, Austria, 4BOKU, Institute of Integrative Nature
Conservation Research and Division of Plant Protection, Vienna, Austria, 5BOKU, Institute
of Zoology, Vienna, Austria, 6CSIC – IAS, Agronomy Department, Cordoba, Spain
INTRODUCTION
Vineyards present some of the largest erosion
rates reported in agricultural areas in
Europe, although there is a large variability
in reported rates. Indeed, under the same
land use, erosional processes are highly
affected by climate, soil, topography and by
the adopted soil management practices
(SMP). The choice of SMP to be adopted is
the main way for farmers to control soil
erosion and meanwhile to increase other
ecosystem services in vineyards. Therefore, it
is very important to provide to farmers and
stakeholders a reliable evaluation of the
erosion risk associated to different SMP in
order to support their choices, for instance by
using soil erosion simulation models. The
Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation
(RUSLE) is one of the most widely used
erosion tool, however it requires a proper
calibration. This poster report the results of
the study addressed at providing the best
estimations of C-values with ORUSCAL, a
simplified erosion prediction model based on
RUSLE, in three relevant wine-growing areas
across Europe.
MAIN RESULTS
Proper calibration by ORUSCAL produced more
accurate values of RUSLE C-factor for the
different SMPs adopted in vineyards in the three
selected areas (Table 1).
Values for bare soil (BS) ranged from 0.17 to
0.27, representing in all location the worst
condition for soil protection. Temporary cover
crop (TCC) which was differently implemented
in Spain and in Austria, resulted in at least 48%
reduction of the C-factor values. The adoption of
permanent vegetation cover (PCC), at least in
the vineyard inter-rows, decreased the C-factor
to values lower than 15% of the C-value obtained
for BS in the same area. The C-factor assumed
values spanning from 0.01 to 0.27, which are
relatively homogeneous across locations and
lower than the general values indicated by
Panagos et al. (2015) for European vineyards
(0.15-0.45).
The soil erosion risk was evaluated by means of
the average annual soil loss (SL) (Table 1). In
Spain and Austria the TCC management
resulted in 54% and 24% predicted SL,
respectively, compared to vineyards managed
with bare soil. In all study areas, the PCC
management allowed a reduction greater than
90% of the predicted SL, with respect to BS
management.
The preliminary results of the study show the
importance of performing RUSLE calibration,
especially for the C-factor, when predicting soil
losses for land uses in which erosion risk is
highly affected by the SMP adopted, and the
effectiveness of ORUSCAL when limited
datasets are available.
MATERIALS AND METHODS
ORUSCAL is a simplified erosion prediction
model based on RUSLE, which was designed and
built to allow RUSLE calibration for a broad
range of management conditions in vineyards
with limited datasets (Gómez et al., 2016).
ORUSCAL was implemented in three wine-
growing regions in Spain, Italy, and Austria
(Fig.1) to obtain C-factor calibration and soil
erosion risk estimation. Climate data were taken
from nearby weather stations and rainfall
erosivity (R factor) from Ballabio et al. (2016).
The required topographic, soil, cover and
management information was taken from field
survey. In Spain and Austria, datasets were
obtained from sampling in 16 vineyards during
the VineDivers project (www.vinedivers.eu). The
vineyards were chosen to represent the two most
common soil management techniques in each
region (low or high intensity in terms of
encouraging ground cover in the alleys or not,
respectively), illustrated in Fig.2.
Fig. 1. Localization of the three wine-growing study areas
on the map showing soil loss by water (RUSLE 2015) from
the European Soil Data Centre (ESDAC),
esdac.jrc.ec.europa.eu, European Commission, Joint
Research Centre.
Spain Italy Austria
C SL C SL C SL
BS 0.27 17.5 0.17 8.5 0.27 19.4
std 0.03 14.8 0.05 6.3 - 12.4
TCC 0.13 9.5 - - 0.14 4.7
std 0.07 4.5 - - - 2.8
PCC 0.04 1.6 0.01 0.6 0.04 1.4
std 0.00 1.4 0.01 0.4 - 0.8
Table 1. Results of the ORUSCAL implementation for the
three study areas: C-factors obtained after calibration (C) and
predicted annual average soil loss (SL, t ha-1 year-1)
Fig. 2. Example of the considered SMP, in the study areas in
Spain, Italy and Austria. Low intensity management: a)
TCC, temporary cover (only in fall and winter), b) and c)
PCC, permanent cover crop. High intensity management: d)
and e) bare soil by tillage or herbicide (BS), e) TCC,
temporary cover crop (TCC), obtained vegetation cover
every second lane, the other one tilled.