VOLUMETRIC QUANTIFICATION OF SOIL LOSS IN A PART OF THE MUNICIPALITY OF OTNICE IN THE CZECH REPUBLIC

This paper deals with the volumetric quantification of soil loss. A device called erosion bridge was used for the quantification. It was designed and created at the Institute of Landscape Water Management, Faculty of Civil Engineering, Brno University of Technology. The principle of the measurement with the use of this device is that the needles are lowered onto the terrain surface and their profile copies the terrain profile. A camera attached to the erosion bridge is important, which is used to take photographs of the erosion bridge with the profile of the rill. For the quantification, a deep erosion rill was chosen in the municipality of Otnice, which is located in the South Moravian Region of the Czech Republic. According to LPIS (Land Parcel Identification System), the land in the locality is used as a grassland (on an arable land). The soil there is composed of brown soil modal (HNm), in terms of soil depth it is deep soil (soil depth is more than 60 centimetres). The rill was measured at the length of 145 metres, a total of 23 profiles at different distances were measured. The field measurement resulted in above-mentioned photographs. These were afterwards assessed by a software program called Erosion bridge. By evaluating the measured profiles and calculating theoretical ones, it was found that the average depth of the rill was 0.25 metres, and its average width was 0.58 metres. It was discovered that the soil loss in the locality was approximately eight cubic metres. That implies that roughly eleven tonnes of soil were eroded at a bulk density of 1.35 grams per cubic centimetre.