Scrutinizing gully erosion hotspots using hybridized deep‐learning analysis to avoid land degradation.

Despite the importance of the prediction of land susceptibility to gully erosion, there is a lack of research studies adopting the deep‐learning approach. This study aimed to predict gully susceptibility hotspots using hybridized deep‐learning models and evaluate their efficiency. Field records of gully occurrences in a gully‐prone region, the Talwar watershed (6468 km2), eastern Kurdistan province, Iran, were used to generate a gully inventory dataset. A total of 14 geomorphometric, environmental, and topo‐hydrological gully drivers were selected as predictor variables. The hybridized models were developed using convolutional neural network (NNC) and metaheuristic procedures, including the gray wolf optimizer (GWO) and the imperialist competitive algorithm (ICA). The validity of the resulting outputs was investigated based on the area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve. Results revealed that the NNC‐GWO had the highest efficiency in the validation step (AUC = 97.2%), whereas the NNC‐ICA was the second‐best model (AUC = 95.1%). The standalone NNC model showed the lowest accuracy (AUC = 91.2%) in predicting gully susceptibility hotspots compared to NNC‐GWO and NNC‐ICA. Thus, both hybridized models had better predictive performance for identifying gully susceptibility in comparison with the standalone NNC model. Furthermore, according to the NNC‐GWO model, about 0.2% (1294.8 ha) and 0.05% (235.2 ha) of the study area were identified as high and very high gully susceptibility classes. In addition, the application of the standalone NNC led to an overestimation of the susceptibility degree for gully initiation. This study supports researchers efforts to increase the model's performance when working in the land degradation domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]