Afforestation of gullies in arid regions, intensification of internal ecological functionality until rehabilitation of the whole area. Attir basin, the Northern Negev, Israel
Introduction
Wide parts of the cultivated arid area over the globe are characterized by loamy soils. The combination of climate extremes, soil with high content of fine particles, a hilly topography, intense cultivations, and local farmers that are often unaware of soil conservation practices leads to enhanced soil erosion and incision phenomena (Catt, 2001, Sun et al., 2014). The most noticeable incision phenomenon in these areas is the gully erosion, which is characterized by the formation of deep gullies and an expansion, enlargement, and branching out of existing ones. Except for the gully land, the neighboured areas are been affected by these geomorphological changes, leading to a severe reduction in vegetation productivity and agriculture utilization of the whole area (Avni, 2005). The used methodology, which was believed to halt this incision in the Negev, is based on damming the gully by soil ramparts perpendicular to the gully stream direction and planting savanna trees in the confined area between two adjacent check dams- the 'gully terrace'. The gully terrace is a water catchment that serves as a retention area for water, nutrients, and sediments from the neighboring area (Adham et al., 2019). Previous studies found that adequate ecological management of water catchments has a wide range of advantages to humans as groundwater recharge. Nevertheless, the mechanism is not wholly described, and ways to influence this ecological functioning are lake (e.g. Everard et al., 2018, Huang et al., 2020). The gully terrace construction for halting the incision was widely carried out by KKL-JNF in the nineteens (The location of the clusters of these modeled gullies is been given in Supp. 1). Nevertheless, in most cases after a few years, the check dams collapsed and the whole area has begun to incise (Muñoz-Robles et al., 2010, Liu et al., 2011), leading to massive damage to the whole area due to the high connectivity of the gullied area landforms (Avni, 2005, Meir et al., 2013). To define the reclamation methodology, we noticed that until recent years gully reclamation relied on using soil refilling or even landfills in the incised parts. Such methodologies, except the damage to the gully's eco-tourism value (Cengiz, 2007), caused in the longterm to an enhanced runoff and erosion (Huo et al., 2021). Therefore, for this study, we adopt an ecological insight, which is based on gully afforestation and ecological management as suggested as e.g. by Borja et al., 2018, Kumar et al., 2020. Nevertheless, as opposed to these important studies and others, which analyzed the influences of afforestation and ecological management in the global insight, here the study will treat the gully as a multi-landforms area (Mor-Mussery et al., 2020). Such an innovative insight will enable to determine and control the intensity of the interactions between these landforms and enhance the area reclamation until sustainable agriculture utilization in the whole gullied area. In summary, the study hypothesizes that intensification of the ecosystem functioning of the gully will enhance the whole area rehabilitation. The objective of this study is to determine the intensity of the ecosystem functioning in the reclaimed gully and its' influence on the neighboured area due to different modulation of the gully terrace, afforestation, and land management regimes.
Section snippets
Site of study
The site of study is located south of the town of Hura on the west bank of Wadi Attir, southern from the Yattir-Eshtemoa confluence and northern to Beer Sheva Valley (Liébault et al., 2016) in an area named Project Wadi Attir (PWA), northern Negev. The topography is hilly with gentle slopes. The area is underlined by late Cretaceous limestones and composed mainly of loess deposits and rocky ground.
The loess is Aeolian one and contains terrestrial clastic sediment, which was formed from
Methodologies and sampling schemes
To determine the rehabilitation change in the gully terrace and its influence on the neighbored area four analyses were carried out: (i) The yearly rehabilitation change of the different gully terraces groups; (ii) The gully terrace internal material (biomaterial and water) flows; (iii) The influence of the gully terrace rehabilitation state on surrounding state; (iv) The influence of the architecture of the gully terraces' cluster on land rehabilitation.
(i) the yearly rehabilitation change of
Yearly soil fertility change of the dammed gully terraces [%]
Herbaceous biomass
A higher yearly change for the herbaceous biomass weight (HBW) was measured in the conserved gully terraces compared to the grazed ones, which was similar to the change in the reference plot. In the Flat-conserved group it was fifteen folds higher than the grazed and in trapezoid-conserved, ten folds higher.
Soil fertility
The highest annual soil moisture content (SMC) increase in the winter set belonged to the Flat-conserved gully terraces group and the lowest in the
Discussion
The study finds, firstly and foremost, indicates the functioning of the gully terrace as a stand-alone ecosystem unit with an influence on its' neighboured area similar to biological ecosystem engineers functioning (Badano and Marquet, 2008). Nevertheless, as opposed to biologic ecosystem engineers that are located on the same surface of the surrounding area, the gully terrace is embedded in the neighbored area, but with different geographic outlines (Arnáez et al., 2015). Moreover, the surface
Conclusions
The most influencing factor that affects the function of the internal gully terrace system is its management schemes. Therefore the most important focus was given here to ones that sustain a functioning ecosystem in the gully terrace area. It was done by letting the natural vegetation grow and develop as opposed to the KKL-JNF that use to till their water catchment surface and herbicide their surface to reduce the vegetal coverage based on a mistaken approach that this vegetal coverage serves
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgments
The authors wish to thank Prof. Jonathan B. Laronne for his highly precious help.
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