Advantages and disadvantages of terracing:A comprehensive review

For thousands of years,terracing has been one of the most important systems for preventing soil erosion,conserving water,and increasing agricultural production.Despite having a long history,the wide-ranging effects and mechanisms of terracing are poorly understood owing to large-scale spatial and temporal distribution patterns and the challenges related to assessing the ecosystem services of terraced landscapes.Thus,our study aims to review comprehensively the effect of terraces by describing the mechanisms behind terraced systems.Terraces provide many ecosystem services,including the reduction of runoff and sediment by over 41.9%and 52%,respectively,and the improvement of grain yields and soil moisture content by 44.8%and 12.9%,respectively.In addition,terracing can also contribute toward the conservation of plant biodiversity on a local scale.However,as terraces age,a number of disadvantages gradually emerge,including interference with water circulation and the development of serious environmental problems caused by poorly designed or mismanaged terraces,where the average runoff and soil loss can be 1—5 times that of well-managed terraces.Although understanding the complexity and multifaceted effects of terracing is vital for terrace construction and management,the negative effects of terracing are often not considered,and existing studies have several shortcomings.Within this context,this paper aims to describe both the benefits and disadvantages of terracing,investigate the gaps in current research,as well as discuss preventive and remedial measures so as to negate the possible bad impacts of terracing.

湘闽赣山区劳动力转移差异对梯田荒决策和规模的影响

In recent years,the phenomenon of abandonment of cultivated land in mountainous areas has occurred frequently,and the problem of abandonment has become a focus of attention of government agricultural departments and academic circles.However,few studies have paid attention to the impact of differences in labor transfer on the abandonment behavior of farmers’terraced fields.Based on this,this paper takes the terraced fields of Hunan,Fujian and Jiangxi provinces as the research area,combined with data from 1438 farmer households,and uses the Probit and Tobit models to analyzed the impact of the difference in the quantity,distance and quality of labor off-farm transfer on the decision-making and scale of terraced field abandonment of farmer households.The results show that:(1)The greater the quantity of labor transfer,the farther the transfer distance and the higher the quality of non-agricultural employment,can promote the decision of farmers to abandon terraced fields;(2)With the deepening of the degree of non-agricultural transfer,the scale of abandoned terraced fields by farmers in hilly and mountainous areas will also expand;(3)The distance and quality of labor transfer can strengthen the impact of labor transfer quantity on farmers’decision to abandon land.To alleviate the phenomenon of abandoned terraced fields,the government should pay attention to the labor substitution role of agricultural service outsourcing and mechanization in mountainous areas.The government should actively promote the transformation of terraced fields into mechanized farming,improve the cultivated land transfer market,and encourage farmers to transfer terraced fields.