Effects of grass contour hedgerow systems on controlling soil erosion in red soil hilly areas, Southeast China

Soil erosion by water is a well-recognized serious environmental problem in the world. While contour hedgerow systems are an effective method for soil water conservation, there are a few studies on its effect in the red soil hilly areas in Southeast China. With a fixed field experiment, we constructed a runoff plot at hilly area in Zhuji County, Zhejiang province, to evaluate the effect of the grass hedgerows in soil water conservation, and to determine the optimized hedgerow patterns. Hemerocallis citrine (HC) and Ophiopogon japonicas (OJ) were selected to build the hedgerows in patterns of one row and two rows. The REE method was used to trace the source of the sediment for a better understanding of the characteristic and mechanism of erosion with hedgerows control. Our results showed that (1) hedgerows reduced erosion and surface runoff by 31.99–67.22% and 15.44–45.11%, respectively; (2) hedgerows delayed the development of rills; (3) hedgerows reduced the soil nutrients loss; (4) hedgerows reshaped the soil physical properties, especially in increasing >0.25 mm water-stable aggregates. Taken together, our results suggest that two-row OJ is the optimized contour hedgerow pattern in the experiment condition, and downward sloping land should have the highest priority to take measures for soil water conservation. This research comprehensively studied the effects and mechanism of contour hedgerows in controlling soil and water loss in red soil hilly areas, Southeast China, so that the practice of soil and water conservation can be implemented more effectively in these areas.