TITLE:
Forecasting Soil Erosion under Climate and Land Use Change Scenarios with Mixed Cell Cellular Automata in Bandama Coastal Watershed, Côte D’Ivoire
AUTHORS:
Lènikpoho Karim Coulibaly, Qingfeng Guan, Xun Liang, Tchimou Vincent Assoma, Naga Coulibaly
KEYWORDS:
RUSLE2 Model, MCCA Model, Silting, Coastal Pollution, Disaster Risk Mitigation, Desertification
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Environmental Protection,
Vol.16 No.11,
November
25,
2025
ABSTRACT: For policymakers involved in land use decision-making, improving knowledge about the expected future soil erosion risk, accelerated by human activities and climate change, is critical. However, the mixed structure of land use and land cover (LULC) has been largely ignored in previous studies, leading to a less accurate estimation of soil erosion risk. This study improves the RUSLE2 model by using the mixed-cell Cellular Automata (MCCA) model to simulate the subpixel dynamics of LULC and obtain a finer simulation of C factor under climate change scenarios. The results in Bandama coastal watershed, Côte d’Ivoire, showed that the vegetation area will be reduced, which will strongly affect cover management values, and the bare land area will increase. With the possible rises in precipitation and temperature caused by climate change, these landscape changes pose a significant risk to soil conservation. The findings suggest that projections of vegetation cover and climate together, commonly disregarded in previous studies, could have a significant impact on future soil erosion. Soil erosion in Bandama coastal watershed will continue to increase, especially in January, February, April, May, August, and September in all scenarios, if conservation planning doesn’t adopt proper land use management during the next decades. The average annual soil loss was 0.1432, 0.1487, 0.1580 t/ha/year in 2020, Scenario 1 and Scenario 2 respectively. From 2000 to 2020, vegetation and wetlands decreased by 7.05% and 3.33% respectively, while cultivated land, built-up, bare land increased by 13.02%, 65.70% and 72.98% respectively. From 2020 to 2040, bare land will increase by 3%. Significant changes of bare land will be located in the northern part, areas around Korhogo city. Vegetation will decrease up to 3.96%. Government needs to adjust land development rules and plans to include land use change monitoring using remote sensing to protect the ecological environment.