| Summary: | Soil erosion is a problem of global significance; yet obtaining data on rates of soil erosion is not straightforward. Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) offers the prospect of improvements in estimates of these rates through better understanding of the movement of individual soil particles. We report on two laboratory experiments to measure the travel distances of surrogate soil particles during erosion events. In the first experiment, we used RFID tags that need to be placed within a reader for identification. In the second, we used tags with a booster antenna that allowed remote detection. The recovery rate of particles in the first experiment was 81.7%. Most likely, lost particles were buried by other moving sediment. The distribution of travel distances is well fitted by a Burr 4-parameter distribution which lends support to its use for modelling travel distances of eroded particles. In the second experiment, the average distance from which particles could be detected was 62 mm and the average error in locating particles was 17.9 mm. We attribute much of this error to the assumptions that the detection field is a circle on the ground with the reader at its centre, and that the same detection range exists for all positions of the reader. RFID is shown to provide insights into the movement of individual soil particles, but improvements are needed in both particle detection range and modelling of soil particle movement before the full potential of RFID for measuring soil erosion can be realized.
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