Research Institute for Soil and Water Conservation

This study investigates the often-overlooked phenomenon of land drainage interventions as a means of climate change adaptation, focusing on a conceptual case study from Northern Bohemia, Czech Republic. The intensification of agriculture has led to extensive tile drainage systems, which have had significant environmental impacts, including disruption of water balance, nutrient leaching, and ecological degradation. With climate change expected to alter precipitation patterns and increase temperatures, these impacts are likely to intensify, leading to more frequent droughts and pollutant delivery from soil to water bodies. This study explores the options for the allocation and implementation of drainage-related measures such as controlled drainage, constructed wetlands, and partial drainage elimination to mitigate these effects, with the use of readily available archival data as well as aerial images, current as well as historical soil, land use, geomorphological and landowner-land user relationships. At two cadastral units with local potable water resources at the hilly Lovečkovicko case study, the paper proposes conceptual, practical approaches for integrating drainage-related measures into land consolidation processes. Here, eleven sites based on the cross-intersection of the above interventions’ criteria were selected, and twenty various drainage-related measures were tentatively designed. This study categorizes the implementation potential of the proposed measures into three levels: high, medium, and low, highlighting the feasibility and transferability of these interventions within the land consolidation or similar process.

In January 2020, the European Union launched the European Green Deal, a comprehensive programme for the transition to new environmental standards in all sectors of the economy with the aim of making Europe the first carbon-neutral continent. Given Ukraine's European ambitions, it is important for it to understand the requirements of the Green Deal and assess the possibilities of taking these requirements into account in the post-war reconstruction of Ukraine. Purpose. To examine the requirements and current achievements in the implementation of the European Green Deal with a view to the prospects of Ukraine's post-war recovery. Results. Based on the EU regulations, current thematic reports, statistics and other open-source publications, the article analyses the main components of the European Green Deal in the context of plans and current achievements in their implementation in the following areas: legislative support, emissions trading system, carbon emissions regulation mechanism at the EU border, transport, energy, construction, agriculture and land use, ecosystem and biodiversity restoration, financial support of the green transition, science and education. Some promising directions of post-war recovery of Ukraine in the context of the Green Deal are considered. Conclusions. Despite the harsh criticism of the European Green Deal, it is vital to overcome the most acute environmental crisis in history, which threatens sustainable development and possibly the very existence of humanity. During the first 3 years of the Green Deal implementation, significant progress has already been made in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, although there are still some difficulties and obstacles. Ukraine has a significant potential for post-war restoration of the energy and industry sector in line with environmental requirements, but this will require significant investments.

Our aim is to compile a methodology for verifying the soil protection effect of various crop cultivation technologies directly in operating conditions and to design and verify such methods of anti erosion protection together with farmers. The methods should be effective, environmentally friendly, and should not endanger the competitiveness of Czech agriculture. The CTU in Prague, together with the Research Institute for Soil and Water Conservation, has been using a rainfall simulator of 8m plot length (16 m2) for soil loss ratio and C-factor estimation since 2015, putting together a database of several hundreds of representative measurements (Stasek et al., 2023). To be able to test different technologies directly at fields in different field conditions, the simulator construction was modified to portable construction of 1m2 plot size. During 2023 both simulators were compared in the field, especially in cultivated fallow conditions, but also for initial crop stages. Technically to be able to operate in field and use limited amount of water while reaching high enough kinetic energy and rainfall uniformity, the construction uses overflow box capturing and recycling water that would be sprayed outside of the measured plot (Kavka et al., 2018). One of the advantages of the 8m plot length was that several nozzles with overlapping spraying cones still reach higher kinetic energies than a single-nozzle construction. What we investigated is that rill evolution is visible in 8 m long plot in fallow conditions, while for 1 m plot length, mostly only interril erosion is prevailing.  For 1 mm.minute-1 rainfall intensity both constructions reach similar runoff rates after ca 10 minutes of the simulation when starting with fully saturated conditions (0.9 litre per minute for large simulator, 0.85 litre per minute for small simulator using the same nozzle type). On the other hand, the sediment transport values at smaller plot size reach only 63% on average (0.0110 versus 0.0175 kg.minute-1). As expected, the variability of sediment transport is higher in between replications on the smaller plot size, due to the greater influence of small surface irregularities, or due to the greater influence of preferential pathways in both surface runoff and infiltration. The contribution presents ways of standardising smaller rainfall simulator data using previous datasets obtained by larger-scale simulations. Data were obtained from the NAZV QK22010261, Mobility 8J23DE006, H2020Tudi No 101000224, and by the CTU Grant Agency in Prague No. SGS23/155/OHK1/3T/11.  

Since the 19th century, the irrigation industry on the territory of the Czech Republic has undergone considerable technological development and an increase in irrigated areas. Irrigation has become an important part of the Czech landscape. Large complex irrigation systems of tens to hundreds of km 2 have been built. Towards the end of the 20th century, there was a significant decline due to the change of political regime, abolition of agricultural companies, etc. Irrigation systems and buildings were often destroyed, devastated, left without maintenance. There have also been several changes in the administrative management of the irrigation sector. The consequence was that there was no single database of irrigation systems. At present, a database of these irrigation systems is being compiled by the Research Institute for Soil and Water Conservation using geographical information systems (GIS). In connection with climate change, the threat of drought, and irregular distribution of precipitation during the growing season, and the issue of irrigation are back on trend. In this study the current state of irrigation systems in the Czech Republic was presented. In the Czech Republic, a total of 175115 ha of irrigation area has been recorded so far (of this area, about 41% is currently in functional). Selected historic irrigation structures were documented by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV).

The paper proposes a new soil evaluation system using the principle of the Saaty method. The Saaty method has been modified and named Soil Assessment System (SAS). Significance weights are assigned to individual soil characteristics (indicators). This provides a more detailed differentiation of the significance of the indicator on soil quality and a more accurate assessment, especially in marginal cases where the assessment by the methods used so far has not been fully conclusive. In addition to physico-chemical properties, other criteria are taken into account to assess not only productional but also non-productional functions. The possibility of using indicators referring to a broader context (e.g., soil sealing value) is also important, thus enabling a comprehensive assessment of the quality of the land. This results in points for individual sampling locations. Soils are categorized according to the number of points and results are shown on maps.