Erosion regulation as a function of human disturbances to vegetation cover: a conceptual model

Human-induced land cover changes are causing important effects on the ecological services rendered by mountain ecosystems, and the number of case-studies of the impact of humans on soil erosion and sediment yield has mounted rapidly. In this paper, we present a conceptual model that allows evaluating overall changes in erosion regulation after human disturbances. The basic idea behind this model is that soil erosion mechanisms are independent of human impact, but that the frequency–magnitude distributions of erosion rates change as a response to human disturbances. Pre-disturbance (or natural) erosion rates are derived from in situ produced ¹⁰Be concentrations in river sediment, while post-disturbance (or modern) erosion rates are derived from sedimentation rates in small catchments. In its simplicity, the model uses vegetation cover change as a proxy of human disturbance. The erosion regulation model is here applied in two mountainous regions with different vegetation dynamics, climatic and geological settings: the Austro Ecuatoriano, and the Spanish Betic Cordillera. Natural erosion benchmarks are necessary to assess human-induced changes in erosion rates. While the Spanish Betic Cordillera is commonly characterized as a degraded landscape, there is no significant difference between modern catchment-wide erosion and long-term denudation rates. The opposite is true for the Austro Ecuatoriano where the share of natural erosion in the total modern erosion rate is minimal for most disturbed sites. When pooling pre- and post-disturbance erosion data from both regions, the data suggest that the human acceleration of erosion is related to vegetation disturbances. The empirical regression model predicts human acceleration of erosion, here defined as the ratio of post-disturbance to pre-disturbance (or natural benchmark) erosion rate, as an exponential function of vegetation disturbance. This suggests that the sensitivity to human-accelerated erosion would be ecosystem dependent, and related to the potential vegetation cover disturbances as a result of human impact. It may therefore be expected that the potential for erosion regulation is larger in well-vegetated ecosystem where strong differences may exist in vegetation cover between human disturbed and undisturbed or restored sites.