ИСТИНА

Most of Russia's agricultural land has historically been located within the Volga and Don River basins, which occupy most of the European part of the country. Intensive agricultural development of this territory began at the beginning of the 18th century from the south of the forest zone and spread south all the way to the foothills of the Caucasus, where the main plowing began in the last quarter of the 19th century. The maximum rates of erosion in the pre-industrial period occurred during periods of significant expansion of the area of arable land, largely due to the development of gully erosion along with sheet and rill erosion. The maximum rate of water and wind soil erosion has been reached since the early 1960s, when heavy agricultural machinery began to be used. At the same time, climatic conditions contributed to the intensification of washout during snowmelt and rainfall. The intensity of wind erosion of soils during this period sharply increased in the south of the steppe zone due to the period of dry springs and strong winds. The last three decades have been characterized by a significant reduction in the rate of snowmelt runoff in the western and central parts of the study area, which is associated with climate change. At the same time, due to the increase in the duration of the warm season, and in the last 10 years, a significant increase in the area sown with row crops and industrial crops, the rate of rainfall erosion is increasing. The report presents the results of different-scale quantitative estimates of the rates of sheet, rill and gully erosion for different parts of the study area, which were obtained based on the use of a set of field research methods, the use of remote sensing data and calculations of erosion rates using erosion models.