Hydroseeding for revegetation in a semiarid Mediterranean environment

Hydroseeding is a technique increasingly used to establish vegetation on degraded areas in order to perform environmental protection. The objective of this paper was to evaluate the effectiveness of four different hydroseeding methods on a degraded artificial slope in the southern Mediterranean area determining total vegetation cover, hydroseeding vegetation cover, hydroseeding success index (HSI), natural and hydroseeded vegetation height. The test area does not allow the use of any operating machine for soil and vegetation management, the only applicable technique is therefore hydroseeding. After hydroseeding was applied (December 2010), 21 checks were carried out every 15 days (from January 2011 till December 2011) to verify the occurrence and development of the hydroseeded species in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the different hydroseeding techniques in the study area. The results of the first experimentation performed in Sicily show that hydroseeding has good prospects of application on degraded areas in semiarid Mediterranean environments. In our study HSI > 0.8 was obtained only in test 2 (thick hydroseeding, period February-June 2011) where there was the contemporary presence of earthworm humus and mulch in addition to the components present in the other tests.