6 Types of Soil Erosion You Should Watch Out For
Soil erosion is when the layers of the earth break down and wear away over time due to natural and manmade elements. Erosion happens naturally, there’s no way to completely prevent it, but there are ways to slow it down or prevent yourself from drastically speeding it up. Erosion can be caused by water, the wind, or a combination of the two. If you want your lawn to remain lively and healthy without constantly replacing the topsoil, learn the types of soil erosion and how you can prevent them.
What Does Soil Erosion Do to Your Lawn?
Soil erosion works in a three-step process – soil detachment, movement, and deposition. Soil detachment is where particles or even portions of topsoil, or the top layer of soil, is detached from the surface. This makes these bits of the topsoil easy to move, typically by the same means, it was detached and deposited in the drainage channels.
Think of when after a good rain, the water is filtering down your driveway, full of mud and dirt. This always happens, but when there is a healthy amount, it’s not a problem. Sometimes, the soil erosion becomes so bad that it blocks your drainage paths, causing buildups that lead to more and worse erosion.
When soil erosion gets especially bad, it leads to a serious loss of nutrients. This will lead to your landscape being unable to support your plants, which can lead to everything from your grass to your shrubs dying off. If nothing is done, the soil can build up with pathogens and plant diseases that will cause your plants to die off. Fixing your lawn after that will cost you a lot more money and take a lot more time than taking care of your lawn as erosion is happening and reducing it.
What Are All the Types of Soil Erosion?
The difference between the types of soil erosion is what causes them. While they all lead to the destruction of your lawn and its ability to support plants, they each take a different path to the end product.
Splash Erosion
This type of erosion follows rainfall. When rainwater hits the soil, it dislodges it. It does this with the impact of hitting the ground, then the water that seeps into the ground dislodges it further. This is a difficult type of erosion to catch before it becomes a problem. Being that it’s natural erosion, it usually only becomes a problem when there’s a larger amount of rainfall than normal, or when it's happening in addition to another type of erosion.
Sheet Erosion
This type of erosion comes after the rainfall is over. Rainfall itself doesn’t always cause noticeable erosion. Sometimes it's the water it leaves behind that does. After a particularly heavy storm, water runoff can cross shallow surfaces and cause the soil to detach and move in greater amounts than most other types of erosion. You can see the effects immediately.
Rill Erosion
When water has seeped into an area after rainfall, flooding, or another reason, if it's allowed to sit repeatedly, it creates small parallel channels, where the water has broken down the soil and seeped into the earth. This happens in areas with poor drainage because they’ve been mishandled or have few places to drain to.
Gully Erosion
This is what rill erosion eventually leads to. If rill erosion isn’t treated, the small channels become deep and wide water channels, similar to permanent streams. These can’t be cured with tilling as rill erosion can. These also represent hazards for farmers and animals alike, with some gullies able to reach 20ft deep.
Wind Erosion
Wind erosion can work in tandem with any of the other types of erosion, but the wind itself can bear down on the land and wear it out over time. Once the soil is dry, fine, and loose enough, the wind can then pick the loose soil.
Floodplain Erosion
If you don’t live in a place familiar with floods, this may seem like something not to worry about, but many parts of Arizona experience 40 to 100 floods a year alone. Floods wash over the soil, breaking it apart and displacing the soil on impact. There isn’t too much that can be done to prevent erosion from floods, other than flood-proofing your property.
Replace Lost Soil With Pioneer Landscape Centers
If you’ve lost soil to erosion, or are trying to keep from having to replace all of your soil, invest in topsoil. This is new soil for the surface of your lawn. It will add nutrients back to your grass, shrubs, trees, and other plants. This will help your lawn heal from any damage it suffered from erosion.
If you’re unsure about what kind of soil you should use or if this is the right time to lay down topsoil, contact the experts at your local Pioneer Landscape Center. Our experts can tell you when you should or shouldn’t lay down the soil.