Rates of Historical Anthropogenic Soil Erosion in the Midwestern United States

Erosion degrades soils, reduces crop yields, and diminishes ecosystem services. The total amount of soil that has been eroded since the initiation of farming is unknown in most agricultural landscapes, which hinders assessment of soil erosion trends. In the Midwestern U.S., erosion has caused native prairie remnants to become perched above surrounding farmland, providing an opportunity to measure historical soil erosion rates. We use high-resolution topographic surveys conducted across erosional escarpments at the boundary between 20 prairies and adjacent agricultural fields and show the median reduction in soil thickness ranges from 0.04 to 0.69 m, corresponding to erosion rates of 0.2-4.3 mm year(,)(-1) with a median value of 1.9 mm year(-1). We used an association between the measured reduction in soil thickness and topographic curvature to predict regional soil erosion integrated since the beginning of farming to the present. We estimate a median historical erosion rate of 1.8 +/- 1.2 mm year(-1), which is nearly double the rate considered tolerable by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Current soil loss predictions from the USDA National Resources Inventory (NRI) and the Daily Erosion Project (DEP) are lower than our historically averaged erosion rate by a factor of 3 and 8, respectively. We suggest that the NRI and the DEP underpredict soil loss rates because they do not include tillage erosion, a process shown to be important throughout the Midwestern U.S. Our findings indicate that further implementation of conservation practices is needed to reduce the high centennial-averaged soil erosion rates that we measure to sustainable levels.

Automated summary

Erosion degrades soils, reduces crop yields, and diminishes ecosystem services. This study measures historical soil erosion rates using erosional escarpments in the Midwestern U.S., and finds that the actual rates are much higher than the acceptable rates suggested by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Current predictions of soil loss underestimate the actual rates because they do not account for tillage erosion.