integrated assessment of the influence of geo-environmental factors on the occurrence of gully erosion (Case Study: Sanganeh Kalat Basin)

Soil erosion is a significant environmental issue of common concern in the world today.  Despite the importance of soil erosion in sustainable development goals in arid and semi-arid areas, the study of the geo-environmental conditions and factors influencing gully erosion occurrence is rarely undertaken. As effort to this challenge, themain objective of this study is to apply an integrated approach to detecting gully erosion features at the Sanganeh Kalat Basin.We also aimed to apply a Conditional Probability (CP) model for establishing the spatial relationship between gullies and the Geo-Environmental Factors (GEFs). The gully erosion inventory map field surveying was randomly partitioned into two subsets: part 1 that contains 70% was used in the training phase of the CP model; part 2 is a validation dataset (30%) for validation of the model and to confirm its accuracy. Prediction performances of the CP model Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROC) curve methods, respectively. In addition, the influence of all GEFs on gully erosion was evaluated by performing a sensitivity analysis model. The validation area under the ROC curve for the CP model were 87.32%, respectively. Also, based on sensitivity analysis, lithology, drainage density, distance from river and land use represent significantly effects on the gully erosion occurrence. This study has shown that the integrated framework can be successfully used for modeling gully erosion occurrence in a data-poor environment.