Modeling And Mapping Water Erosion Risks In The High Atlas Of Morocco: The Atlas Of Beni Mellal As A Case In Point

The aim of this work is to show the importance of the use of remote sensing and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to map soil degradation by water erosion in the Atlas of Beni Mellal located in Moroccan central High Atlas. To reach this goal, we have followed a methodology based, on the one hand, on the Spectral Indices approach (SI, BI and NDVI) and on the Spectral Angle Mapper (SAM) and Spectral Information Divergence (SID) supervised classifications, and, on the one hand, on a multicriteria analysis (MCA) of the various factors involved in water erosion (slope, friability, and land use). The water erosion risk maps obtained were compared to ground truth for validation.