Does soil compaction increase floods?

A review

authored by

Abdallah Alaoui, Magdalena Rogger, Stephan Peth, Günter Blöschl

Abstract

Europe has experienced a series of major floods in the past years which suggests that flood magnitudes may have increased. Land degradation due to soil compaction from crop farming or grazing intensification is one of the potential drivers of this increase. A literature review suggests that most of the experimental evidence was generated at plot and hillslope scales. At larger scales, most studies are based on models. There are three ways in which soil compaction affects floods at the catchment scale: (i) through an increase in the area affected by soil compaction; (ii) by exacerbating the effects of changes in rainfall, especially for highly degraded soils; and (iii) when soil compaction coincides with soils characterized by a fine texture and a low infiltration capacity. We suggest that future research should focus on better synthesising past research on soil compaction and runoff, tailored field experiments to obtain a mechanistic understanding of the coupled mechanical and hydraulic processes, new mapping methods of soil compaction that combine mechanical and remote sensing approaches, and an effort to bridge all disciplines relevant to soil compaction effects on floods.

External Organisation(s)

University of Bern
TU Wien (TUW)
University of Kassel

Type

Review article

Journal

Journal of hydrology

Volume

557

Pages

631-642

No. of pages

12

ISSN

0022-1694

Publication date

02.2018

Publication status

Published

Peer reviewed

Yes

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Water Science and Technology

Sustainable Development Goals

SDG 15 - Life on Land

Electronic version(s)

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhydrol.2017.12.052 (Access: Closed)