The ⁷Be profiles in the undisturbed soil used for reference site to estimate the soil erosion

Abstract

© Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd. The cosmogenic radionuclide 7Be is increasingly used to obtain information on event-related soil erosion rates within agricultural landscapes. In this study, we select two undisturbed and flat areas to calculate the reference inventory and relaxation mass depth by using 7Be technique to document short-term erosion. Our results showed that the depth distribution of 7Be in undisturbed soil profiles was 1.0 cm in sites S02 and S03; the initial activities were 31.6 and 38.8 Bq.kg-1, respectively. The relaxation mass depths were 5.4 and 7.2 kg.m-2 and the measured reference 7Be inventories were 71 and 110 Bq.m-2 for sites S02 and S03, respectively. The difference values of the relaxation mass depth and the reference inventory of both sites implied that for determining a short term soil erosion using 7Be, the reference site was suggested to be selected as close as possible to the study site.