Introduction
Location Map
Base Map
Database Schema
Conventions
GIS Analyses
Flowchart
GIS Concepts
Results
Conclusion
References

Soil Erosion Potential in the Bale National Park and Resulting Recommendations for Vegetation Protection

We were interested in creating a project in GIS for the Bale Mountains National Park in Ethiopia that could be useful on many scales and across landscapes. Soil degredation is a global problem and is particularly problematic in countries that are highly dependent on agriculture. GIS is a great tool for looking at this type of problem due to its ability to handle large datasets and expedite what could, in other venues be very lengthy calculations of slopes and related parameters having to do with hillslope stability.

The analysis portion of the project was relatively simple and straightforward.  However, the preparation portion of this project was, as is often the case when working with GIS, the most important step.  Preparing the data for analysis involved creating new layers, georeferencing the hand-drawn soils map, making sure that all of the layers were in the correct/same projection, making sure that all of the pertinent information was included - i.e creating fields in the attribute table for the soils layer to identify the soil types in each newly digitized polygon.

Deciding on the method for analysis was also an important step.  Recognizing what is important in your analysis and making sure that the methods that you choose actually answer the question that you are trying to get at, while sounding a bit obvious, can be cloudier than one would expect.  There are a lot of consumer-created add-ons as discussed in our Conclusions section that offer users different options for looking at soil erosion and depending on the problem that you are trying to solve, as well as the data that you have available to you, one of these options might be better than the rather simple analysis that we chose to use.