1942). This focus on the effects of

1942). This focus on the effects of land use on the sediment load in
rivers still resounds these days, not only at the policy level, but also in
scientific literature e.g. (Valentin et al., 2008) and ‘universal soil loss
equations’.
Most erosion research in Indonesia is carried out at plot scale
(40–500 m2), mainly to quantify soil erosion rates under different land
cover, slope and soil types. These research results have led to an
impressive commitment to national level soil conservation programs.
On Java in Indonesia, most upland agricultural land has now been
terraced, but at the catchment scale the sediment yield problempersists
and the effectiveness of these conservation programs has been
challenged (Rijsdijk, 2005). These plot scale results have often been
implicitly, but also explicitly scaled up to the catchment scale e.g.
Nibbering and De Graaff (1998) and Schiettecatte et al. (2008). Many
water erosion assessments were (and are still) based on the Universal