An educational computer tool for simulating long-term soil erosion on agricultural landscapes

Abstract

Due to its economic and environmental impacts, soil erosion has been a major concern to farmers, engineers and policy makers in recent years. Water and tilling are two of the main agents responsible for this phenomenon and considerable efforts have been made to model them in previous work but not with educational purposes. A computer tool for facilitating any user’s simulation of long-term landscape evolution in a plot due to the combined action of water and tillage erosion is presented here. It integrates a graphic user interface with two well-verified erosion models, each one independently devoted to reproduce the effects of water and tilling. This computer tool permits to the student the consideration of the erosivity index and the presence of a crop in the plot, when simulating water erosion, as well as the planning of a different type of tilling each year. Each kind of tilling corresponds to a different combination of tillage tools with their own date, tillage depth and tillage direction. A handy ASCII (XYZ) file is generated containing the long-term soil erosion spatial pattern as result. From this information, the student can derive other results that will help to understand soil erosion. An example is presented here with the aim of showing how to use this computer tool to simulate this phenomenon on an agricultural landscape with a complex topography.