Quantifying and modelling the impact of land consolidation and field borders on soil redistribution in agricultural landscapes (1954-2009)

- Study of 137Cs residuals to assess the impact of land consolidation on soil erosion.
- Conversion of depositional areas into sediment delivering areas.
- Intensive erosion and deposition concentrated on present and former field borders.
- Soil redistribution largely dominates by tillage-induced processes.
- Soil erosion on present field borders hardly simulated by conversion model.

Soil erosion rates in cultivated areas have intensified during the last decades leading to both on and off-site problems for farmers and rural communities. Furthermore, soil redistribution processes play an important role in sediment and carbon storage within, and exports from, cultivated catchments. This study focuses on the impact of land consolidation and changes in landscape structure on medium term soil erosion and landscape morphology within a 3.7-ha field in France. The area was consolidated in 1967 and we used the 137Cs-technique to quantify soil erosion for the period (1954-2009). We measured the 137Cs inventories of 68 soil cores sampled along transects covering the entire area and especially specific linear landforms located along both present and past field borders (i.e., lynchets and undulations landforms, respectively). These results were then confronted with the outputs of a spatially-distributed 137Cs conversion model that simulates and discriminates soil redistribution induced by water and tillage erosion processes. Our results showed that tillage processes dominated the soil redistribution in our study area for the last 55 years and generated about 95% (i.e., 4.50 Mg·ha− 1·yr−1) of the total gross erosion in the field. Furthermore, we demonstrated that soil redistribution was largely affected by the presence of current and also former field borders, where hotspots areas of erosion and deposition (> 20 Mg·ha− 1·yr− 1) were concentrated. Land consolidation contributed to the acceleration of soil erosion through the conversion of depositional areas into sediment generating areas. Although the conversion model was able to reproduce the general tendencies observed in the patterns of 137Cs inventories, the model performance was relatively poor with a r2 of 0.20. Discrepancies were identified and associated with sampling points located along the current field borders. Our data suggests that tillage erosion processes near field boundaries cannot be described as a typical diffusive process. These processes near field boundaries should be characterised and taken into account in a future version of the model to accurately simulate rates and patterns of past soil redistribution in fragmented cultivated hillslopes. We also showed that the use of an accurate DEM resulting from LIDAR data, based on present-day topography, leads to the underestimation of soil redistribution rates by the model, especially in this landscape submitted to recent and important morphological changes. Our results have important implications for the simulation of tillage erosion processes and our understanding of soil redistribution processes in complex cultivated areas. This is of particular interest to improve our knowledge and prediction of patterns of soil physical parameters, such as carbon storage or water content, particularly sensitive to surface erosion and landscape structuration.