Among the most important components of the soil are minerals, humus and nutrients as well as ground water, air, worms and micro-organisms. The condition of the ground is dependent on the climate, weathering and its age, as well as the geological conditions and the influence of other organisms. All of these factors together influence the fertility of the ground.
Fertile agricultural land is essential for the feeding of people. However, in the years 2000 and 2001 alone, 6% of global cultivatable land was lost. This loss of land was due to increasing settlement and road building as well as the progressive development of industrial areas and various other environmental damage.
Find out what environmental damage can affect the ground and how this damage occurs:
I rarely occur naturally and am often caused by people. I am found along the banks of retreating waters such as the Aral Sea or the Dead Sea. However, I appear first and foremost in dry regions in which farmland has been subject to over-irrigation as this raises the water table, the water at the surface evaporates and I am left along with minerals. Many areas of arable land have been lost to me, primarily in Australia, Syria, Egypt, Pakistan, the USA and in Iraq. In the long-term I lead to infertility of the ground. I can be combatted using drip irrigation and drainage systems as well as substrate mixtures.
On the one hand I can be caused naturally by flowing water and the wind, but on the other hand by people through plowing, overgrazing and deforestation. I am a kind of carrying off of the ground and can occur linearly or over whole surfaces. Due to me, valuable nutrients in the ground are lost, its fertility decreases and finally it can produce no more crops. Primarily I have reached worrying levels in the tropics and subtropics, but also in the USA. I range from depletion through to a complete destruction of the soil.
I am a result of a worsening of the land in relatively dry areas. My occurance is partly influenced by the climate, but partly by human activity too. If the livestock per area, under the given dry climatic conditions, is too large we call it overgrazing. Due to grazing animals, the vegetation becomes thinner and the soil breaks up. Increasing soil erosion is the result. But also I arise due to over-and inappropriate agricultural use and deforestation in arid areas. Currently around ¼ of the global land area is threatened by me.
Correct answer: Desertification
I am the result of farm animals eating the plant cover too much and / or crushing it, so that the soil can not regenerate fast enough. This happens in intensive farming if too much livestock grazes on a small area. On the one hand I decrease the coverage of the surfaces, on the other hand only increasingly unfit or worthless plants grow, in extreme cases, the vegetation dies off completely and thus I lead to soil erosion and consequently desertification.
