TITLE:
Effects of Vegetation Cover and Land Use Changes on Soil Erosion in Kalaya Watershed (North Western Morocco)
AUTHORS:
Khadija Ben Hamman Lech-hab, Lamiae Khali Issa, Ahmed Raissouni, Abdelkrim El Arrim, Abdelghani Afailal Tribak, Rachid Moussadek
KEYWORDS:
Remote Sensing, GIS, Kalaya Catchment, Land Use, USLE
JOURNAL NAME:
International Journal of Geosciences,
Vol.6 No.12,
December
29,
2015
ABSTRACT: Vegetation cover
degradation is still a very common problem in many parts of Morocco; moreover,
it affects straight up the amount of the annual soil loss rate. The analytical
approach used in this study, respectively, includes remote sensing techniques,
application of USLE (Universal Soil Loss Equation) and overlay analysis in a raster
Geographic Information System (GIS) environment, employing available
information on the region covering the Kalaya catchment. Thus, this procedure
allowed the calculation of the NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index),
the execution of two types of classification (unsupervised and supervised) for
1999 and 2010 imagery and eventually the prediction of soil erosion risk in the
watershed in question. The main outcome was the production of multidate
vegetation cover maps, land use maps and soil loss risk maps. The overlay of
two maps allowed us to highlight the changes occurred in this area, which
evidence the high anthropogenic impact on the dynamics of land use and
vegetation cover. The results suggest that the outputs of this study can be
used for predicting rate of soil loss, which varied from 31.68 t·ha-1·yr-1 in 1999 to 34.74 t·ha-1·yr-1 in 2010.