Does biochar mitigate rainfall-induced soil erosion? A review and meta-analysis

Abstract

Biochar has emerged as a promising soil amendment for improving soil structure. Yet, its impact on rainfall-induced soil erosion varies across individual studies. To address this gap, we conducted a statistical meta-analysis of 174 paired comparisons from 45 published studies to integratedly evaluate the impacts of biochar on rainfall-induced soil erosion through biochar and soil properties, as well as experimental conditions. Overall, biochar significantly reduced soil erosion by 27.86%. The response ratio (lnRR) of biochar-induced soil erosion exhibited significant variability across different subgroups. Concerning biochar properties, a more favorable influence was observed in other sources biochar (e.g., manure and sewage sludge biochar) compared to wood based and crop waste biochar, and those produced at lower pyrolysis temperatures (< 500 °C). Increasing biochar dosage was not consistently effective. The optimal range was 0.8%-2%, resulting in a 36.07% reduction in soil erosion. Regarding the soil properties, a higher sand/clay ratio of soil significantly enhanced the performance of biochar (p < 0.0001). Specifically, an insignificant effect was observed in fine-grained soils, whereas the highest reduction of 52.97% was noted in coarse-grained soils. Moreover, long-term field experiments induced greater reductions in soil erosion with biochar (35.30%) compared to short-term laboratory studies (29.62% and 12.59%). This meta-analysis demonstrates that biochar, as a potential soil amendment, could effectively mitigate rainfall-induced soil erosion by considering a combination of soil properties along with specific biochar properties.

Keywords

Biochar / Soil erosion / Rainfall / Meta-analysis

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Yu Lu: Writing - original draft, Validation, Methodology, Investigation, Formal analysis, Data curation. Kai Gu: Writing - review & editing, Supervision, Project administration, Methodology, Funding acquisition, Conceptualization. Bin Shi: Writing - review & editing. Qiyou Zhou: Writing - review & editing, Supervision.

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

This research was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Program No. 42277124) and the Jiangsu Province 333 Talents Youth Talent Support Project.

Appendix A. Supporting information

Supplementary data associated with this article can be found in the online version at doi:10.1016/j.bgtech.2024.100096.

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