Geophysical Research Abstracts Vol. 18, EGU2016-6935-3, 2016 EGU General Assembly 2016 © Author(s) 2016. CC Attribution 3.0 License. Rock fragment cover controls the sediment detachment in citrus plantations Artemi Cerdà (1,2), Saskia Keesstra (2), Seyed Hamidreza Sadeghi (3), Eric Brevik (4), Antonio Giménez Morera (5), Agata Novara (6), Reginald E. Masto (7), Antonio Jordán (8), and Juan Wang (9) (1) University of Valencia, Soil Erosion and Degradation Research Group (SEDER). Department of Geography, Soil Erosion and Degradation Research Group, Valencia, Spain. artemio.cerda@uv.es., (2) Soil Physics and Land Management Group, Wageningen University, Droevendaalsesteeg 4, 6708PB Wageningen, The Netherlands. saskia.keesstra@wur.nl, (3) Department of Watershed Management Engineering, Faculty of Natural Resources, Tarbiat Modares University PO Box 46417-76489, Noor, Iran. sadeghi@modares.ac.ir, (4) Department of Natural Sciences, Dickinson State University, Dickinson, ND, USA. eric.brevik@dickinsonstate.edu, (5) Departamento de Economía y Ciencias Sociales, Escuela politécnica superior de Alcoy, Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Alcoy, Alicante, Spain. angimo1@doctor.upv.es, (6) Department of Scienze Agrarie e Forestali, University of Palermo, viale delle scienze, Italy. agata.novara@unipa.it, (7) Environmental Management Division, CSIR- Central Institute of Mining and Fuel Research (Digwadih Campus), Dhanbad, 828108, India. mastocfri@yahoo.com, (8) MED_Soil Research Group. Dep. of Crystallography, Mineralogy and Agricultural Chemistry, University of Seville, Spain. ajordan@us.es, (9) School of Hydraulic, Energy and Power Engineering, Yangzhou University, Yangzhou, Jiangsu, 225009. China. wangjuan@yzu.edu.cn Citrus orchards are seen as a source of sediments and water due to the lack of vegetation cover, the widespread use of herbicides, the compaction due to the use of heavy machinery, the lack of organic amendments and the removal of the pruned branches (Cerdà and Jurgensen, 2008; Cerdà et al., 2009; Cerdà and Jurgensen, 2011; Li et al, 2011). This is not unusual in agriculture, where high soil erosion losses are found in the orchards (Dai et al., 2015; Erkossa et al., 2015; Ochoa-Cueva et al., 2015). Therefore, there is a need to reduce the sediment delivery, and to achieve a sustainable situation with lower and renewable soil erosion rates (Cerdà et al., 2015; Nanko et al., 2015; Mwango et al., 2016). Vegetation cover is the most efficient strategy to control soil and water losses at different scales (Cerdà, 1999; Keesstra, 2007; Zhao et al., 2014), but farmers in the Mediterranean Regions prefer bare soils as this reduces the amount of water used by the plants, and also because of aesthetic concerns, as bare soils are perceived as tidy and therefore seen by farmers as the way their orchards should look. So therefore, there is a need to find an efficient strategy that reduces soil losses and will be accepted by the farmers also. One potential option for this may be to use rock fragments (stones) as a mulch to reduce the soil losses. Other researchers already found rock fragments to be an effective tool to reduce erosion (Poesen et al., 1994; Poesen and Lavee, 1994; Cerdà, 2001; Jomaa et al., 2012; Martínez Zavala and Jordán, 2008; Jordán and Martínez Zavala, 2008; Jordán et al., 2009; Zavala et al., 2010). Furthermore, rock fragments can improve soil quality and contribute to the restoration of ecosystems (Jiménez et al., 2015). However, most previous research on soil erosion and rock fragment cover was done under laboratory conditions or in forest soils. Meanwhile, little is known about the role of rock fragments in agriculture land under field conditions. The objective of this research is to determine the impact of the rock fragment cover on soil and water losses in cit- rus plantations. Within the Corral Roig Soil Erosion Research Station, located in the Municipality of Montesa, 82 plots were selected with different rock fragment cover. In each circular plot of 0.25 m2, a rainfall simulation exper- iments was carried out at 55 mm h-1 of rainfall intensity during 1 hour under dry conditions in the Summer of 2013 under very dry conditions. It was found that the soil erosion rates are related to percentage of bare soil, and neg- atively correlated to the rock fragment covers. A cover of 30 % of rock fragments reduces the loss of soil with 81%. Acknowledgements The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement n ◦ 603498 (RECARE project). References Cerdà, A. 1999. Parent material and vegetation affect soil erosion in eastern Spain. Soil Science Society of America Journal, 63 (2), 362-368. Cerdà, A., Giménez-Morera, A. and Bodí, M.B. Soil and water losses from new citrus orchards growing on sloped