Spatial mapping of water erosion with MCDA tool in ArcGIS

This course is a handful, easy to learn, and apply guide for students, who want to apply GIS instrument and Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) to delineate areas that are highly or low susceptible to water erosion. The knowledge and skills represented throughout the course are easy to master and apply for any study area a student desires.

Water erosion is a very widespread phenomenon throughout the world and causes many negative consequences to the environment and human activity, including damage to agricultural productivity, reduction of soil fertility, and harming biodiversity. Besides the aforementioned, water erosion causes infrastructural damage, flood, and mass movement disturbances.

AHP is the most widely applied multi-criteria decision analysis tool and is used for multiple purposes during GIS analysis, including soil erosion modeling. AHP incorporates both psychological and mathematical methods to assign appropriate weights while making a different choice, whether it is choosing a university department, buying a car, or even searching for a partner. In this course, AHP will be used to assign weights for seven thematic layers that directly influence water erosion.

These layers include land use and land cover, precipitation, slope, curvature, topographic wetness index, soil texture, and stream proximity.

The course will teach to prepare all those thematic layers for any study area. By accomplishing this course a student will be able to create a map of water erosion susceptibility for any study area and understand clearly grasp the factors causing soil erosion. The results a student may use either for thesis dissertation or publication of an article, as well as conducting a research project.

The course includes both the theory and practice lectures, focusing mostly on the latter one (80%). This is a very useful course for both beginners and people with an intermediate knowledge of GIS and soil science.