The Most Important Hydro-Environmental Drivers Affecting Gully Erosion Occurrence Through Wrapper Methods

This study aimed to draw connections between gully erosion occurrences and hydro-environmental factors in watershed areas that illustrate relationships. For this aim, feature elimination methods help diagnose the most key drivers. So, three Wrapper methods of Sequential Forward Selection (SFS), Sequential Backward Selection (SBS), and Exhaustive Feature Selection (EFS) were taken to account for feature extraction, by considering the Random Forest model as an estimator. Considering the results of the models, the most important identified variables were aspect, drainage density, elevation, distance to road, landuse, and slope. The outcomes of this research procure insights for watershed managers to know how should face gully erosion.