Impact of sustainable land management practices on controlling water erosion events: The case of hillslopes in the Czech Republic

Assessing the impact of water erosion events can provide valuable information for sustainable land management. The Czech Republic's Monitoring Erosion of Agricultural Land (MEAL) program only records erosion events that exceed certain thresholds of erosion tolerance criteria (percentage of affected plot area, quantities of eroded soil, other material damages) as determined by trained authorized employees of state land offices (SLO). The main goal of this study was to identify major socio-economic characteristics that have promoted the occurrence of water erosion events in the Czech Republic. For this purpose, two variables of erosion event occurrence and event frequency were tested using the data set of 1594 erosion events from 2011 to 2019 in the Czech Republic. Accordingly, five site characteristics and five farm characteristics were examined to determine factors affecting the occurrence of erosion. Results showed that two characteristics (plot size and land tenure) have been confirmed as significant predictors of repeated erosion events (plots with as many as 8 separate erosion events were recorded). The results also showed that there is still a need for strong protection of soil against erosion. Therefore, we recommend that selected systemic measures in the form of agri-environmental standards (Good Agricultural Environmental Conditions (GAEC)) should be updated to facilitate stricter soil protection in the long-term EU (European Union) budget. These findings have enabled us to formulate practical recommendations for more effective protection of agricultural land against water erosion.