India needs a better gully erosion map

Gully erosion affects India widely. Badlands, the most extreme form of land degradation caused by gullying, are also observed across large parts of Central and Western India. Akin to other environmental issues, accurate maps are critical in planning and implementing land management measures to address gully erosion. While country-wide gully erosion maps are rare commo­dities, India is probably the only country having several datasets including such maps. Gullies and badlands have been mapped as part of nationwide geomorphological, land degradation and wastelands mapping endea­vours. However, upon examination of said maps using high-resolution imagery on Google Earth, it was found that they are largely imprecise, with each having false positive rates (gully erosion mapped where it is not present) of greater than 70%. It is suspected that the coarse spatial resolution of the satellite images used (LISS-III 23.5 m) is the root cause of such low accuracy, but feature misinterpretation by the analysts might also have contributed to it. As such, there is little to no reliable information on the magnitude of the gully erosion problem in India. Therefore, a bespoke high-resolution gully erosion map is of the essence in India’s drive to realize land degradation neutrality by 2030.