Abstract:Severe gully erosion has posed a threat to food security in the black soil region of northeastern China, one of the largest grain-producing areas. Therefore, the prevention and control of gully erosion have become the top priority of soil and water conservation in recent years. Consequently, an estimation model of gully volume is a key step in modeling and mapping the gully erosion over a large scale, thereby to determining the erosive prone areas for better control of gully erosion. However, few researches were focused on modeling gully volume in this area. This study aims to explore the gully features, and then to build a gully volume model, finally assess the erosion parameters using the high-resolution remote sensing stereoscopic satellite imaging. The same high-resolution digital elevation model (DEM) was extracted from ENVI software using WorldView-2 stereoscopic satellite images (0.5 m resolution). ArcGIS 10.3 was selected to calculate gully morphological parameters of 45 gullies in a catchment located in the mountainous and hilly region of northeast China. The specific parameters included the top width (TW, m), bottom width (BW, m), depth (D, m), cross-sectional area (CSA, m2), gully length (L, m), gully area (A, m2), and the volume (V, m3). The results showed that the average values of TW, BW, D, CSA, L, A, and V were 5.63 m, 2.82 m, 1.05 m, 4.94 m2, 81.90 m, 470.54 m2, and 428.53 m3, respectively. The means of the width ratio between the gully top and bottom was 0.48, indicating that the cross-section of the gully was mainly in an intermediate shape (V-U shape). The mean of the ratio between gully top width and depth was 5.95, where all of gullies were greater than 1, indicating that the collapse of gully-wall was faster than that of deep-cutting in the study area. There was an extreme significance in the gully volume and the length (V-L) or area (V-A) of study areas. A very prominent relationship of power function was also found between the gully volume and length/area, and the determination coefficients (R2) of the volume estimation model were 0.57 and 0.90, respectively. Furthermore, the mean relative error and Nash coefficient further verified that the V-A model was more accurate and effective to predict the gully volume. The b value of power function was smaller in the black soil region of northeast China, compared with the Loess Plateau and the dry/hot valley regions, whereas, the b value was larger in the mountainous and hilly regions than in the rolling and hilly regions of Northeast China, indicating that the gully erosion was more serious in the mountainous and hilly region of Northeast China. The precision of the V-A model depended mainly on the gully features. Correspondingly, the ratio between gully length and top width can serve as an index of classification for better performance in modeling gully erosion. The finding can provide a scientific basis to assess the gully volume over a large scale in the mountainous and hilly regions of Northeast China.