A computational framework for mitigating land degradation: A synergy of knowledge from physical geography and geoinformatics

The impairment caused by land degradation processes to agricultural fields requires a solution in the magnitude provided by state-of-the-art technology to guide decision makers, practitioners and farmers on how to, where and when to tackle the possible threat of soil movement by water. Identification of areas prone to gullying can help in prioritizing soil conservation practices that can be

extremely expensive when management of an entire catchment is the problem at hand. The main problem is that in relation to the wide areas of agricultural fields, areas prone to gully initiation are very small, and their detection can be like searching for a needle in a haystack or in other words, they are what is known in information systems engineering as the ‘rare cases problem’ (Svoray et al., 2012).