Assessment of Gully Erosion Susceptibility Using Multivariate Adaptive Regression Splines and Accounting for Terrain Connectivity

In this work, we assessed gully erosion susceptibility in two adjacent cultivated catchments of Sicily (Italy) by employing multivariate adaptive regression splines (MARS) and a set of geo-environmental variables. To explore the influence of hydrological connectivity on gully occurrence we measured the changes of performance occurred when adding one by one nine predictors reflecting terrain connectivity to a base model that included contributing area and slope gradient. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves and the area under the ROC curve (AUC) were used to evaluate models performance. Gully predictive models were trained in both the catchments and submitted to internal (in the ca…