Soil erosion processes and nutrient loss. 1. The interpretation of enrichment ratio and nitrogen loss in runoff sediment

Abstract

The ratio of nutrient concentration in eroded sediment to that in the original soil (the enrichment ratio, ER) commonly varies with the accumulated soil loss. The objective of this study was to investigate possible factors contributing to this change in ER when erosion was accompanied by a significant depth of water. The enrichment ratio was directly measured on sediment from a sandy clay loam soil. ER was followed as a function of time for eight erosion experiments in which the mix of erosion processes and the fractional surface cover was varied. By using a simulated rainfall tilting flume facility, experiments covered low slope (0.1%), when rainfall detachment was the only erosion process, and 3% soil surface slope, where the processes of rainfall detachment and entrainment occurred. The type and extent of fractional surface cover was varied for the experiments with the 3% slope. In all cases, the rainfall rate was 100 mm h-1and the drop size was 2.2 mm. A new analytical framework is described, showing that ER can be interpreted from the product of two component distributions. The first component distribution is the concentration of sediment as a function of sediment size (a distribution found to vary with time and mix of erosion processes). The second distribution is nitrogen concentration (largely organic) as a function of size (found to be much less time-variable than sediment size). The conclusions reached, after analysis of these experimental data by using this framework, were: (i) time variation in ER was largely due to time variation in the first component distribution; (ii) values of ER different from unity require some variation with sediment size (or settling velocity) in the concentration of the nutrient sorbed to the soil or closely associated with the soil organic matter; (iii) the more that rainfall detachment dominates runoff erosion as the major erosion process, the more likely it is that ER is greater than unity.