Indagini sulla stima della produzione di sedimenti mediante l'impiego della tecnica del cesio137. Il caso del torrente Trionto in Prov. di Cosenza

In the last few decades the radionuclide cesium-137 (137CS) has been used as a tracer to estimate the soil loss in several countries of the world. The application of this technique, which is based on a mathematic fitting of the radionuelide profile into the soil, requires the use of some conversion models able to convert loss or gain of the radionuclide into soil erosion or deposition estimateso In this paper two different conversion models have been applied with the aim to explore their suitability over a Calabrian catchment for which turbidity measurements at the catchment outlet are available. A detailed field investigation consisting of the calculation of soil deposition upstream of ten checkdams built during the period of measurements allowed to account for this additional contribution in calculating the total sediment yield at the catchment outlet. The satisfactory agreement between measurements and estimates of soilloss using the two adopted conversion models confirmed the suitability of the radionuclide technique to calculate soil erosion in cuitivated soils.