Forests in headwater areas benefit water quality and hydrologic cycling. Furthermore, maintaining and restoring the forest cover in headwater catchments offers other, multiple benefits such as increased soil water retention, intercepted pollution pathways, improved soil, maintained biodiversity and captured carbon dioxide.

Grassed waterways are shallow channels (natural or constructed) with grass cover, used to drain surface runoff from cropland and prevent erosion.

Reduced tillage, involving no plowing in the autumn, preserves stubble or plant cover during the autumn and winter to prevent soil erosion, and particle and nutrient loss from cropland to watercourses.

Permanent meadows or pastures are more effective in controlling land degradation than arable cropping. They are especially appropriate in hilly regions on sloping land where the risk of water erosion is high.

No-till agriculture replaces conventional soil tillage in order to reduce costs and labour - and to provide a mulch layer on the soil surface from the residues of the previous crop: this protects the soil surface and its ecology.

Detention ponds are artificially excavated basins that collect stormwater runoff and eroded sediment from the upstream catchment. The water stored in these ponds is slowly released into a water body or it infiltrates into the groundwater – or both. Their primary functions are flood control, erosion control and water quality improvement.

A cropping system which allows to plant the seeds directly into the soil without ploughing. The soil is covered with plant remainders.

Small retention ponds, located in the forest, are ponds or pools with sufficient storage capacity to store the surface runoff to prevent flooding during heavy rainfall events. Ponds contain limited or no water during dry weather, but are designed to retain water during rain events.

Afforestation is planting trees on previously non-forested land. Trees hold the soil and reduce runoff, and thus prevent erosion of the most fertile layers. It is an effective way to rehabilitate degraded lands, being a nature-based solution which addresses flood and soil erosion impacts.

Establishment of grass - or retaining stubble - on arable land that is prone to erosion and flooding to reduce the risk of soil and nutrient losses.