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In general, there is no natural soil surface that would not be threatened by water erosion. However, a number of methods that estimate the erosive soil risk incorrectly exclude forests and flat agricultural land from the category of areas vulnerable to water erosion. Forests are known for their soil protection functions, when a dense tree canopy interrupts precipitation and decreases the kinetic energy of water drops falling on the soil surface. Moreover, the top organic soil layer in forests has a very good infil...

An increasing frequency and magnitude of flash floods motivates water managers and other authorities to focus on enhancing flood protection of small headwater watersheds, which are especially vulnerable to this type of flooding. One of the ways how to achieve this goal is to increase the volume of existing small water reservoirs (SWR) dedicated to store flood wave. This paper investigates the possibilities of utilizing a SWR Vrbovce (west of Slovakia), which is currently being used for water supply and fishery, in...

The development of regional or local maximum permissible concentration (MPC) for a pollutant in the soil requires the field or laboratory simulation of pollution. The experimental design should include the control (uncontaminated soil with the background concentration of the pollutant) and at least three treatments with different pollutant concentrations in the range between 2 and 10 background values. Experiments are performed in at least three replicates. Soil samples are taken 30 days after contamination. In ea...

The aim of this article is to study astronomical refraction anomalies. Back in 1925 Grachev and Banahevich found systematic errors in meridian observations depending on zenithal distance. Grachev suggested that these refraction anomalies arise from the inclination of the Earth's surface to the South. The airstratas of the same density were considered as parallel to the Earth's surface. But the analysis of latitude observations from the Bamberg and ZTL-180 telescopes showed there were significant systematic errors ...

The monitoring of precipitation amounts plays an important role in the estimation of water balance as well as in the understanding of complex hydrological processes taking part in a catchment. High spatial and temporal variability of the rainfall could have a significant impact on the reliability of the performed hydrological analyses, which puts an increasing demand on sampling frequency and density of monitoring network. This is especially important in the case of small catchments, often with a small number or n...

The generation and occurrence of surface runoff from a slope is driven by many factors, such as the slope gradient, the physical properties and current state of the soil, the type and density of the vegetation cover, and the intensity and duration of rainfall events. Within the study experiments with a rainfall simulator were focused on an analysis of the impact of a changing slope gradient on the generation of surface runoff and the amount of eroded soil material. The experiments were conducted in laboratory cond...