Monitoring water erosion in lowland England and Wales—A personal view of its history and outcomes

A personal account is given of the history of monitoring soil erosion by water in England and Wales from the late 1960s to the present. Prior to the mid-1970s it was not easy to carry out research on water erosion and information was obtained on an ad hoc basis. Since 1982 there have been four major monitoring schemes, three of them national schemes funded by the Ministry of Agriculture, and one scheme on the South Downs of Sussex, southern England, carried out by John Boardman. The three national schemes were carried out by staff of the (then) Soil Survey of England and Wales (1982–1986), of the (then) Agricultural Development and Advisory Service (1989–1994) and by the (then) Soil Survey and Land Research Centre (1996–1998). Some results of these four schemes are compared. It is likely severity of erosion has not changed over time. The evidence that erosion may have increased in extent over the last 20 years is arguable. Although most erosion occurs in winter cereals—all four schemes show this—three of the schemes, because of the ways in which they were set up, overemphasise the fact. The results from the more extensive 1982–1986 scheme show that fields drilled to other crops can be more vulnerable. A new monitoring scheme is urgently needed and should cover large blocks of land representative of the soil landscapes of England and Wales. In this way a sufficient number of eroded fields will be located to allow statistical analysis of the data and to enable future trends in severity and extent of water erosion to be identified.