Simulation of medium-term soil redistributions for different land use and landscape design scenarios within a vineyard landscape in Mediterranean France

Inappropriate agricultural land management practices cause irreversible soil losses in many parts of Europe. Soil degradation is predicted to increase in the next future as an effect of climate and cropping system changes. The most concerned areas are expected to be those already severely affected by erosion, as is the whole of the Mediterranean. Medium-term soil erosion models could be useful tools to analyse, understand and simulate complex interactions between geomorphic processes and human pressures for better assessment of medium-term soil redistributions associated with land use and landscape design change. The aim of this study was to compare the effects of various agricultural land uses and landscape design strategies on water and tillage erosion. The first step was to develop land use and landscape design scenarios of an agricultural Mediterranean landscape. Then, all of the scenarios were compared in terms of the soil redistribution using the LandSoil model. The results indicate that potential soil conservation associated with the adoption of sustainable land uses surpasses the potential conservation associated with certain landscape design. A detailed analysis of within-landscape soil redistributions suggests that land use is a major factor controlling sediment production, whereas landscape design is a major factor controlling hillslope connectivity