Remote Gully Erosion Mapping Using ASTER Data and Geomorphologic Analysis in the Main Ethiopian Rift

The Main Ethiopian Rift(MER)is an area of extreme topography underlain by post-Miocene volcanic rocks,Jurassic limestone and a Precambrian basement.A prime concern is the rapid expansion of wide gullies that are impinging on agricultural land.We investigate the potential contribution of Advanced Space-borne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer(ASTER)data and geomorphologic parameters to discern patterns and features of gully erosion in the MER.Maximum Likelihood Classifica-tion(MLC),Support Vector Machine(SVM),and Minimum Distance(MD)classifiers are used to extract different gully shapes and patterns.Several spatial textures based on Grey Level Co-occurrence Matrices(GLCMs)are then generated.Afterwards,the same classifiers are applied to the ASTER data combined with the spatial texture information.We used geomorphologic parameters ex-tracted from SRTM and ASTER DEMs to describe the geomorphologic setting and the gullies’ shapes.The classifications show accuracies varying between 67% and 89%.Maps derived from this quantitative analysis allow the monitoring and mapping of land degradation as a direct result of gully-widening.This study reveals the utility of combining ASTER data and spatial textural infor-mation in discerning areas affected by gully erosion.