Measuring and Mapping Patterns of Soil Erosion and Deposition Related to Soil Carbonate Concentrations Under Agricultural Management

The overall goals of this study are first to provide an efficient method for quantifying and describing spatial patterns of soil erosion and deposition at field scales and second, to test a conceptual model relating these patterns to near surface soil carbonates. These methods give us a better understanding of the inter relationships between surface soil carbonates and the land surface processes of erosion and deposition. The main advantages of these techniques are the accurate detection of changes in soil surface elevation over time and the rapid analysis of soil carbonates over many soil samples.

We first had the idea for this research after updating the digital elevation maps. A map of the elevation differences showed clear patterns of erosion and deposition and we wanted to look at how that related to carbonate concentrations. For this protocol, use field software to record the RTK GPS position data at every five minutes throughout the survey area.