Collaborative Research: The Cuban landscape, quantifying the effects of industrialized agriculture followed by country-wide soil conservation using sediment-associated isotopes

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To minimize the detrimental effects of deforestation and intensive, mechanized agriculture, conservation agricultural practices are often employed. Although these lower-impact practices have been implemented around the world, results have rarely been quantified at a landscape scale. Cuba is a perfect location to test these effects because 30 years of industrial, mechanized monoculture were followed by 25 years of necessity-driven, small-scale, organic agriculture after the collapse of the former Soviet Union. This project will document the effects of the conversion to organic agriculture and provide important data to inform soil conservation studies. Through this project, one Masters student, two upper-level undergraduate students, and four lower-level undergraduate students will be trained in geoscience research and learn about sustainable agricultural practices. This project has two research goals. 1) It will quantify the effects of wide-spread changes in agricultural land use from conventional, mechanized monoculture to small-scale organic farming. This project will use chemical tracers in river sand to measure long-term erosion rates of the surrounding landscape and will compare those erosion rates to published data measuring short-term erosion rates. In addition, researchers will trace the changing depth of erosion during the transition from industrial to organic agriculture using other different chemical tracers. 2) The project will develop new techniques for measuring erosion rates in rock types currently not easily studied, thus expanding areas of the world where erosion rates can be measured.This award is co-funded by the Geomorphology and Land-use Dynamics Program and the Office of International Science and Engineering.