Development of gully erosion processes: A 3D investigation based on field scouring experiments and laser scanning

Abstract Gully erosion is a severe form of soil erosion. However, current understanding of the relative dominance of processes that drive the development of gully erosion is limited. This study investigated the development of gully erosion, and the contribution of mass movement and water erosion to gully erosion based on fourteen scouring experiments on two field plots and terrestrial laser scanning (TLS). A three-dimensional (3D) method was proposed to derive the volume of gully erosion based on point clouds with topographic change information. The results showed that TLS-derived gully sediment yields were in a high agreement with the measured sediment yield (R2 > 0.85, p