Soil erosion monitoring and its implication in a limestone land suffering from rocky desertification in the Huajiang Canyon, Guizhou, Southwest China

Over the past decades, the vast limestone mountain areas in southwestern China have suffered greatly from karst rocky desertification (KRD), which is a unique type of desertification caused by irrational land-use practices and has drawn increasing attention of international academic community. Characterizing soil erosion in this region is the key to understanding the escalating KRD problem and finding solution to it. The authors applied leveling method to study soil erosion process in the Huajiang Karst Canyon area between 1999 and 2003, and tried to relate it to KRD expansion. The monitoring data indicate that soil in the study area was losing at an alarming rate, which is much higher than soil formation rate and has already resulted in severe KRD problem. Soil loss under different land-use conditions varied greatly during the monitoring period. The highest soil erosion rate occurred in bare and newly abandoned cropland, followed by sparse grass land, forest land, and dense grass land. In addition, soil erosion could be significantly different under different micro-topographic conditions. Because soil erosion rate in the studied karst mountain areas is surprisingly high, it is urgent to take quick actions to fight against the ongoing KRD problems in Southwest China before an irreversible situation occurs. However, the traditional way to combat KRD by abandoning current cropland needs to be carefully reconsidered, since a bare newly abandoned cropland may suffer more from rapid soil loss than before.