Using GIS and remote sensing for mapping land sensitivity to wind erosion hazard in the middle Moulouya Basin (North-Eastern Morocco)

Wind erosion is one of the most serious forms of land degradation in arid and semi-arid regions because it affects agricultural land, which in turn leads to a decrease in the quality of the soil leading to economic losses. As a perfect area of study, the northeastern region of the Kingdom of Morocco, specifically the Moulouya Basin, is considered the first on the list of areas threatened by this alarming environmental phenomenon. This study aims to apply the fuzzy logic approach, remote sensing data, and geographic information systems (GIS) to analyze wind erosion and sensitivity mapping data in the basins of Middle Moulouya and Guercif. To this end, the reliance is based on three causative factors obtained using fuzzy logic approach functions for each parameter: soil, vegetation, and climate. Furthermore, the fuzzy operator "GAMMA " was applied to create a wind erosion sensitivity map. The success rate curves revealed that the fuzzy gamma factor (y), with gamma = 0.9, gave the best predictive accuracy of 85.2% for the area under the curve. The wind erosion sensitivity map includes areas with regions of five relative sensitivity classes: very high, high, moderate, low, and very low. The estimated result was verified by field measurements and the statistically significant high value of the chi-square test.