Quantifying the impact of rural land management on soil hydrology and catchment response

This thesis investigates several types of rural land management and the relationship with soil hydrology, local runoff and catchment response. There has been a clustering of extreme events over the last few decades which has encouraged debate amongst hydrologists that the frequency and magnitude of hydrological extremes are increasing. Land management changes are thought to have caused modifications to the hydrological cycle by altering the partitioning of rainfall into runoff. In England, farming is dominated by pastoral agriculture, with 40% of land cover classified as either improved or semi-natural grassland according to the Land Cover Map 2007. Nationalwide change to farming practices since the Second World War are thought to be responsible for high levels of soil compaction, longer slope lengths, increased runoff velocities and greater potential for connectivity, which may be responsible for an increase in flood risk at the catchment scale. However, there is a lack of physical evidence to support these theories.