The Innovation Team of Smart Agriculture of the Institute of Agricultural Resources and Regional Planning (IARRP) of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS), in collaboration with Ruhr-University in Germany and Beijing Normal University, had made progress in studying how prewinter soil water regimes affect post-winter cracking positions on gully sidewalls and slumping soil dynamics.

The research results were published in Geoderma (impact factor 7.422) under the title "Prewinter soil water regime affects the post-winter cracking position on gully sidewall and slumping soil dynamics in Northeast China".

Gully erosion is one of the most destructive land degradation processes. Gullies are widely distributed since the 1950s in the Mollisol region of China, becoming one of the greatest threats to national food security and environmental protection. Soil slumping along cracks on a gully sidewall is a crucial process of gully development, yet the factors controlling the dynamics and amount of slumped soil remain unclear.

In this study, the soil water regime was manipulated by infiltrating 250 mm of water into the plots placed with one edge 10, 30 and 50 cm away from a gully sidewall before winter. Soil freezing started from the topsoil on 14 Nov. 2017 and penetrated the 1-m soil profile within 24 days. Soil thawing started from both the topsoil and subsoils (1 m depth) on 13 Apr. 2018 and ended on 24 Apr. 2018. The results demonstrated that pre-winter soil slope hydrology affected the soil dynamics of the gully sidewall slumping, through determining the depths of freezing-induced fissures within soil profile and its impacts on the positions of the drying-induced cracks on the gully sidewalls. This study implies that gully development through soil slumping depends on pre-winter slope hydrology, which should be considered in modeling and controlling gully development.

Fig.1 Temporal changes in the isolines of the average soil temperature (a) and 0 ◦C (b) of different infiltration treatments in the 1-m soil profile 30 cm away from the open soil pits.

Fig. 2 Processes and controlling factors of pre-winter soil water on crack formation and soil slumping from gully sidewalls.

Dr. Yanru Wen from the IARRP is the first author, and researcher Bin Zhang from the College of Resources and Environmental Sciences, Nanjing Agricultural University is the corresponding author. The research was co-funded by the National Key Research and Development Program Project (No. 2021YFD1500700), the General Project of the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (No. 2021M703538), and the Open Project of the State Key Laboratory of Earth Surface Processes and Resource Ecology (Beijing Normal University)(No. 2021-KF-09).

[Citation method and original text link]:

Yanru Wen, Heng Jiang, Till Kasielke, Harald Zepp, Yang Yang, Wenbin Wu, Bin Zhang*. Prewinter soil water regime affects the post-winter cracking position on gully sidewall and slumping soil dynamics in Northeast China. Geoderma, 2023, 435, 116508.

Paper link: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoderma.2023.116508