Watersheds Morphometry and Structural Interpretation of Lineaments Extracted from SRTM Data in the Mayo-Kani Division Far-Nord Region, (Cameroon)

In the Far-North Region of Cameroon, the high rate of weathering and erosion of rocks do not allow to map the hydrological and geological structures in the field. This paper aims to test the combined use of field topographic data and Shuttler Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) data to define watershed morphometry, highlight the different erosion factors, and characterize the structural lineaments of the Mayo-Kani Division, within the Far-North Region of Cameroon. All these are done using; watersheds, hydrographic network, slopes, manual lineaments and automatic lineaments maps. These treatment techniques used (filtering, enhancement and slope analyses) allows: to morphologically characterize the ten identified Mayo-Kani watersheds, to measure the erodibility rate of the watersheds using the Universal Soil Loss Equation (USLE) and to compute the fracture maps. This last operation was validated using ground truth field observations and the literature review. Fracture networks were analyzed using statistical analysis techniques by studying fracture length distribution laws.