An integrated GIS tool for gully erosion modelling

Gully erosion seriously affects the landscape and human life in different ways by destroying agricultural land and infrastructures, altering the hydraulic potential of soils, or affecting the water quality and quantity. Due to climate change, the negative effects of gully erosion are likely to increase in future, threatening especially low-income agricultural regions. In the past decades, quantitative methods have been proposed to simulate and predict gully erosion at different scales. However, gully erosion is still underrepresented in modern GIS-based modelling and simulation approaches. Therefore, we developed a tool to assess gully erosion dynamics. This tool comprises the data preparation, modelling and output analysis of the modelling phase as well as the visualization of the results. The modelling procedure is based on Sidorchuk’s gully simulation model. The tool was developed using phyton and the QGIS environment.