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© 2023 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.

Abstract

Gully erosion is considered to be a highly destructive form of soil erosion, often leading to the occurrence of natural calamities like landslides and mudslides. Remote sensing images have been extensively utilized in gully erosion research, and the suitability of extracting gully morphology parameters in various topographic regions needs to be clarified. Based on field measurements, this paper focuses on two widely used high-resolution remote sensing images: Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) and Google Earth (GE) imagery. It systematically examines the accuracy of gully morphological characteristic extraction using remote sensing in two regions with different terrain characteristics. The results show the following: (1) Compared to interpreting wide gullies with unclear shoulder lines, centimeter-level UAV imagery is more suitable for interpreting narrow gullies with clear shoulder lines. Conversely, the interpretability of sub-meter-level GE imagery is exactly the opposite. (2) The error in interpreting gully head points (GHPs) based on UAV images is less than 1 m, while the errors in gully length (GL), width (GW), perimeter (GP) and area (GA) are all below 3%, and these errors are hardly affected by gully morphology. (3) The error of GHPs based on GE images is concentrated within the range of 1–3 m. Meanwhile, the errors associated with GL, GP and GA are less than 10%. Conversely, the error of GW exceeds 11%. Furthermore, the aforementioned errors tend to increase as the gully width decreases and the complexity of the gully shoulder line increases. These findings shed light on the suitability of two commonly used remote sensing images for gully morphology extraction and provide valuable guidance for image selection in future research endeavors in this field.

Details

Title
Comparative Analysis of Gully Morphology Extraction Suitability Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicle and Google Earth Imagery
Author
Zhang, Chunmei 1 ; Wang, Chunmei 1   VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Long, Yongqing 1   VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Pang, Guowei 1 ; Shen, Huazhen 1 ; Wang, Lei 1 ; Yang, Qinke 1 

 Shaanxi Key Laboratory Earth Surface System and Environmental Carrying Capacity, College of Urban and Environmental Sciences, Northwest University, Xi’an 710127, China; [email protected] (C.Z.); [email protected] (Y.L.); [email protected] (G.P.); [email protected] (H.S.); [email protected] (L.W.); [email protected] (Q.Y.); Key Laboratory of Ecohydrology and Disaster Prevention in Arid Regions, National Forestry and Grassland Administration, Xi’an 710048, China 
First page
4302
Publication year
2023
Publication date
2023
Publisher
MDPI AG
e-ISSN
20724292
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
ProQuest document ID
2862728582
Copyright
© 2023 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.