Background Soil and water loss monitoring is the basis of national soil and water conservation planning and deployment. At present, a relatively perfect soil and water loss monitoring network has been established in China, and automatic monitoring facilities and equipment have been widely used in the country. Compared with manual monitoring, automatic monitoring is more objective, continuous and universal, but there are also mechanical, dependence and other shortcomings. Therefore, in order to promote the efficient development of soil and water conservation monitoring work in China, it is very necessary to sort out and summarize the existing issues of soil and water conservation monitoring work at grass-roots level and sum up experience.

Methods In view of common issues in soil erosion monitoring in China and based on the observation experience of Chongling Observation Station in Hebei province for many years, authors listed the problems of equipment, labor and data from the two observation facilities system of runoff plot and small watershed, and proposed solutions or optimization schemes for the problems.

Results 1) Runoff plot: The range of runoff and sediment automatic observation instrument is limited, and it is recommended to set up water and sediment observation compound equipment. The precision of automatic equipment is high, which is greatly affected by the field environment, thus it is recommended to install alarm device to handle equipment failure manually in time. Automatic equipment is professional and difficult to maintain independently in the later stage, modular assembly of equipment should be explored to facilitate self-maintenance. The amount of data from automatic equipment is huge, and the task of reorganizing data is heavy, thus the management department can unify the requirements, standardize the database of manufacturers, which may reduce the amount of data sorting. 2) Small watershed: The observation facility of the control station is single and the range of measurement is narrow, it is suggested to lay compound weir according to the actual situation and condition. The standards for observation facilities are not defined well and the construction is not standardized, thus the administrative departments may normalize them. It is difficult to coordinate the automatic observation of water and sediment in control stations, so multi-point observation and multi-probe automatic monitoring equipment are suggested.

Conculsions The targeted solutions about the facilities, equipment, personnel, system operation management, data processing and so on are put forward by sorting out and summarizing the problems. It can effectively solve the issues of the operation, management and operation of the facilities and equipment in the current observation of soil and water conservation, so that the monitoring work will be more rigorous, more scientific and more practical. And all of this will provide a strong guarantee for the national soil erosion prevention and control and soil conservation planning.