Amaury Frankl

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• Professor
• Professor at Ghent University

Purpose To mitigate erosion, soil and water conservation measures have been introduced widely, with the ambition to reduce on-site erosion rates and catchment sediment yield. However, the success of such measures has been questioned, and often lacks a scientific basis. This is especially true in Ethiopia where gullying has been reported to worsen b...

ሓያል ኣምበጣ ግራትካ በሊዑስ ኣብ ደጎልካ ይሰፍር:: --------------- A locust swarm that ravaged your crops camps in your backyard. ------------Abstract: This study investigates the impact of the Tigray war on agricultural activities in the region during the 2021 cropping season. The conflict, beginning in late 2020 amidst a desert locust infestation, resulting in a...

Following two years of combat, blockade, and power outage, the Tigray war in northern Ethiopia has had a substantial negative impact on the environment (2020–2022). This photographic dataset, part of a rare study carried out by the same research team before and after a war, compares 26-year legacy data on land degradation, with post-war observation...

The Tigray war in northern Ethiopia has had significant environmental effects on the land, after two years of fighting, blockade and power outage (2020-2022). This study contrasts post-war observations at 56 sites in Tigray’s Dogu’a Tembien district with 26-year legacy data on land degradation, a rare study conducted by the same research team befor...

Spatially distributed water balance model WetSpass was chosen to estimate spatial and temporal recharge and evapotranspiration of Mt. Guna. Field based data and remote sensing data were used to successfully run WetSpass Model. The observed meteorological input data were corrected to minimize topographical effect by developing a regression equation,...

Sediment connectivity indexes serve as a diagnostic tool for investigating the overall hydro-geomorphological functioning. The primary factors influencing sediment connectivity are rainfall and changes in land cover. For the period 1995–2016, we investigated changes in sediment connectivity in two ca.1000 km² catchments located in the Ethiopian Hig...

This article presents an evaluation and sensitivity analysis of km‐scale simulations of an unprecedented extreme rainfall event over Europe, with a specific focus on sub‐hourly extremes, size distributions, and kinetic energy (KE) of rain. These variables are critical for hydrological applications, such as flood forecasting or soil‐loss monitoring,...

The soils of the high-elevation mountains along the East African Rift Valley are poorly understood. Assessing the potential of soils for agriculture, climate change mitigation, and environmental functioning requires insight into how they relate to the factors influencing soil formation. Between 3000 and 4120 m a.s.l., 85 soil profiles of Mount Guna...

Wars have multifaceted effects on small-scale farming systems. Due to the paucity of field data, researchers take remotely sensed data as the best option to monitor and map changes in farming systems in relation to war. However, unless supported by ground data, such an approach hardly considers the diversity in local conditions as experienced by lo...

The soils of the high-altitude mountains along the East African Rift Valley are poorly understood. Understanding the potential of soils for agriculture, climate change mitigation, and environmental functioning necessitates an understanding of their relationship to soil-forming factors. Therefore, this study focuses on the volcanic soils of Mount Gu...

Ecosystem services (ES) are the connection between nature and society, and are essential for the well-being of local communities that depend on them. In Ethiopia, church forests and the surrounding agricultural matrix supply numerous ES. However, the ES delivered by both land use types have not yet been assessed simultaneously. Here we surveyed bot...

Simulating the carbon-water fluxes at more widely distributed meteorological stations based on the sparsely and unevenly distributed eddy covariance flux stations is needed to accurately understand the carbon-water cycle of terrestrial ecosystems. We established a new framework consisting of machine learning, determination coefficient (R²), Euclide...

This project focuses on the rural livelihoods in the Tigray region of northern Ethiopia, which heavily relies on small-scale subsistence farming. However, sustainable resource management is hindered by limited resources, capacity, climate disruptions, and change. This leads to low agricultural productivity and high food insecurity. Despite progress...

Saharan dust outbreaks have profound effects on ecosystems, climate, human health, and the cryosphere in Europe. However, the spatial deposition pattern of Saharan dust is poorly known due to a sparse network of ground measurements. Following the extreme dust deposition event of February 2021 across Europe, a citizen science campaign was launched t...

A supplementary data for the article https://doi.org/10.1080/02723646.2018.1458577

Despite many years of establishment of exclosures in the semi-arid environments of north Ethiopia for rehabilitation of degraded areas, its effectiveness is constrained by water deficit. There is lack of empirical data on the response of vegetation to additional water (spate irrigation) application. This study was aimed to evaluate the effects of s...

Mise en oeuvre d'un Secteur de Référence des sols en montagne Pyrénéenne, autour de la double question de la dégradation des sols (érosion) et du maintien de leur productivité fourragère. Bassin versant du Bastan, dans les Hautes-Pyrénées.

Saharan dust outbreaks have profound effects on ecosystems, climate, human health and the cryosphere in Europe. However, the spatial deposition pattern of Saharan dust is poorly known due to a sparse network of ground measurements. Following the extreme dust deposition event of February 2021 across Europe, a citizen science campaign was launched to...

Due to war conditions, the local farmers had to largely rely on their own crop production, mainly by subsistence farming, in Tigray, North Ethiopia. We assessed the crop stands in 2021 and evaluated the level of resilience of the indigenous farming system. Quantitative data were collected from 161 farm parcels in various ecoregions of this tropical...

Due to war conditions, the local farmers had to largely rely on their own crop production, mainly by subsistence farming, in Tigray, North Ethiopia. We assessed the crop stands in 2021 and evaluated the level of resilience of the indigenous farming system. Quantitative data were collected from 161 farm parcels in various ecoregions of this tropical...

Floodplain sediment storage is an important component of a catchment’s sediment budget. Here, we present the first quantification of floodplain sediment storage for tropical river catchments draining to Lake Tana, NW Ethiopia. The catchments are characterized by relatively gently sloping to flat lowlands towards the lake (1788 m a.s.l.) and steeper...

Accurately assessing landform evolution and quantifying rapid environmental changes are gaining importance in the context of monitoring techniques in alpine environments. In the European Alps, glaciers and rock glaciers are among the most characteristic cryospheric components bearing long and systematic monitoring periods. The acceleration in rock...

High mountain environments are among the most fragile on Earth. Due to anthropogenic disturbances and the exposure to extreme weather events, the rates of soil erosion have recently been accelerating, resulting in ecological degradation and geological hazards. Ecological restoration of mountains and an improved understanding of nature-based solutio...

Purpose Identifying best practices for sediment fingerprinting or tracing is important to allow the quantification of sediment contributions from catchment sources. Although sediment fingerprinting has been applied with reasonable success, the deployment of this method remains associated with many issues and limitations. Methods Seminars and debat...

Geotourism is a sustainable type of tourism that focuses on the geological and geomorphological heritages of an area, and the associated cultural and biodiversity features. Though the popularity of geotourism is rapidly growing, research on the demand side, particularly on segmenting tourists to geosites and understanding their profiles, is limited...

High mountain environments are increasingly affected by rockfall‐related hazards, driven by climate change. Studying rockfall in these environments is, however, challenging due to the inaccessibility of mountain ridges and the complex interaction between controlling factors. In this study, the rock wall of Grosse Grabe North Pillar in the Matter va...

Understanding woody plant species composition and structure is fundamental to design and optimize the needed conservation measures for Ethiopian church forests. The aim of this study was to describe the composition, structure, and regeneration status of woody species in church forests in southeast of Lake Tana, Ethiopia. Data were collected from tw...

The study of water fluxes is important to better understand hydrological cycles in arid regions. Data-driven machine learning models have been recently applied to water flux simulation. Previous studies have built site-scale simulation models of water fluxes for individual sites separately, requiring a large amount of data from each site and signif...

Land degradation due to soil erosion presents a major challenge for sustainable development. We investigated runoff and sediment yield dynamics in the NW highlands of Ethiopia. The study area included 14 zero-order catchments with a surface area ranging from 324 m² to 1715 m². V-notch weirs produced from plastic jars were introduced as measuring al...

Collecting field data on 161 sampling sites in very difficult conditions has allowed us to evaluate the status of cropping in part of the Tigray region of Ethiopia, by the end of August 2021. We have observed that local farming communities are remarkably resilient, also in times of conflict and instability. Relying on indigenous knowledge and local...

This study examines the spatial relationship between land cover change and its drivers at varying scale in Mt. Guna. The recent land cover map was generated from Google Earth Image (2018), and the historical land cover map generated from the 1957 and 1980 aerial photos. Multi-scale Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) and Ordinary Least Square...

Vegetative barriers are increasingly used to reduce sediment export from cropland and thus mitigate negative off-site consequences of soil erosion. Here, we report and discuss the effectiveness of vegetative barriers implemented in Flanders (Belgium) to buffer flows of water and sediment. The three types of vegetative barriers studied are made of s...

Study Region We investigate the event runoff response in six sub-catchments in the Lake Tana sub-basin, headwater of the Blue Nile basin, northwest Ethiopia. Steep and mountainous terrains surround floodplains, imposing runoff and soil erosion in the upper catchments and flooding and sedimentation at floodplains. This study was conducted in the upl...

Land degradation due to soil erosion presents a challenge for sustainable development. We investigated the impact of land use type and land management practices on runoff and sediment yield dynamics in the northwestern highlands of Ethiopia. The study area included 14 zero-order catchments with a surface area ranging from 324 m2 to 1715 m2. V-notch...

The archive of aerial photographs, dating 1935-1941 and covering parts of north and central of Ethiopia, is one of the few archives with pre-1960 remotely sensed data in Africa. It allows adding 30 years of time-depth for geographical studies, in contrast to the commonly known oldest imagery dating to 1964, sometimes 1958. These photographs were or...

Gully erosion is a major environmental problem, posing significant threats to sustainable development. However, insights on techniques to prevent and control gullying is scattered and incomplete, especially regarding failure rates and effectiveness. This review aims at addressing these issues and contribute to more successful gully prevention and c...

Forest fragmentation is globally pervasive but especially severe in tropical forests, as exemplified by the state of Afrotropical montane forests in Ethiopia, where remnant forests almost exclusively exists as small, isolated fragments centered around churches, forming networks of partially intact ‘habitat islands.’ Church forests deliver ecosystem...

Lake sediment budgeting is a vital tool to better understand catchment sediment fluxes. It allows assessing lake lifetimeand can be used to design improved catchment management plans. Over the past fewyears,we collected sediment and runoff discharge data at fine spatial-temporal resolutions for the Lake Tana Basin (LTB), Ethiopia. Based on these da...

Talus slopes are common places for debris storage in high‐mountain environments and form an important step in the alpine sediment cascade. To understand slope instabilities and sediment transfers, detailed investigations of talus slope geomorphology are needed. Therefore, this study presents a detailed analysis of a talus slope on Col du Sanetsch (...

Dataset: aerial photographs Ethiopia 1935-1941

The objective of the study on which the article is based was to investigate the distribution, characteristics and livelihood effects of debris cones in the Aba'ala and Raya grabens in Ethiopia. The characteristics of the debris cones and their upper catchment areas were obtained from Google Earth Pro and Landsat images. Questionnaires were used to...

Soil erosion constitutes a major problem in the European loess belt. From England to Eastern Europe, loess-derived soils are particularly susceptible to water and tillage erosion. This is certainly the case for the Aa River Basin (Nord-Pas-de-Calais, northern France), where a relatively thin Pleistocene loess cover is present on top of a substrate...

The magnitudes of flash floods and their effect on channel width changes were investigated for Hara river in the Raya graben (northern Ethiopia). Precipitation was measured using rain gauges evenly distributed over the study catchment. Event peak discharges were measured with crest‐stage gauges at a reference cross‐section. Changes in channel width...

Knowledge of the geographical distribution of soils is indispensable for policy and decision makers to achieve the goal of increasing agricultural production and reduce poverty, particularly in the Global South. A study was conducted to better understand the soilscapes of the Giba catchment (900–3300 m a.s.l.; 5133 km²) in northern Ethiopia, so as...

Remote sensing data can be used to improve our understanding of environmental change over longer periods. Here, we used a series of orthorectified aerial photographs of 1938–1940 and 1957 and recent satellite images of 2014–2016 to explore trends and patterns of woody vegetation cover in the Lake Tana Basin of northwestern Ethiopia, and to understa...

Focus: matching agricultural water demand and supply is a growing policy challenge in drylands. We investigated the water balance components in Raya (3507 km 2) and Ashenge (80.5 km 2) grabens. The rainfall depth, river discharge, abstraction, climate and soil data (2015-2017) were used to address the research question. New hydrological insights: t...

Little is known about the contribution of bedload flux to the total sediment load exported from tropical sand-bed rivers. Yet, predicting bedload transport rates contributes to better river management, more appropriate river engineering works design, accurate knowledge of sediment delivery rates, which greatly benefits sediment related water resour...

Extensive catchment degradation throughout the Ethiopian highlands induced by long‐term intensified land use, erosion prone topography and climate cause substantial soil erosion that limits agricultural productivity and result lake sedimentation. However, before taking soil conservation measures, management of the soil loss problem essentially need...

Agisoft PhotoScan is a commonly used software to produce Digital Surface Models (DSMs) in geoscientific research. Based on the Structure-from-Motion (SfM) and Multi-View Stereo (MVS) principles, the software produces 3D environments from 2D imagery (often taken by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV)). However, random elements in the unpublished computer...

In order promote geosites and research findings on human-environment interactions in Ethiopia's tropical mountains, we prepared a geoguide about the Dogu'a Tembien district in Tigray, Ethiopia, a mountain district with a varied geography and spectacular landscapes. Since we are a large team conducting research in that district and local people tell...

As a response to low agricultural productivity, inorganic fertiliser sales have exponentially grown in Ethiopia, and evidence exists of a supply that is beyond the demand in the drier northern parts of the country. Hence, we have investigated the geographical determinants of the fertiliser black market in north Ethiopia. Quantitative data on fertil...

In high alpine environments, talus slopes are often inaccessible or unsafe due to their steep slopes (30 •-37 •), a high surface roughness, frequent rock falls or other hazardous geomorphic processes. Conventional approaches (Total Stations, Terrestrial Laser Scanners or differential Global Navigation Satellite Systems) to study its topography have...

This book is based on over 150 papers about the Dogu’a Tembien district in Ethiopia. To reach a broader public of people interested in geosites and human-environment interactions, the authors here add a geoguide about this mountain district in Ethiopia(13°30’ N, 39°10’ E; upto 2850 m high) which shows a varied lithology. A large team has carried o...

A highly seasonal and erratic rainfall pattern (Chapter 3) seems to provoke general water scarcity in Dogu’a Tembien for eight months a year. This chapter shortly describes the hydrogeological context and hydrodynamics of actual surface and groundwater flow of the mountain catchments around Hagere Selam. Further, some positive effects of water harv...

Over the past decades, many investments in soil conservation have been made to limit the negative effects of gully erosion in Dogu’a Tembien. Gully erosion remains, however, a key soil erosion process resulting in land degradation in the fragile environment.

This book shows that northern Ethiopia has been suffering from severe land degradation for centuries and became strongly impoverished, but also that many efforts are done to reverse the situation. In this context, generations of students and research assistants have investigated the environment of Dogu’a Tembien, mainly in research projects funded...

In this chapter, we present an overview of historical aerial photographs and maps of Ethiopia, illustrating it with examples from Dogu’a Tembien. Availability and quality of currently existing maps are also discussed, as well as the use of landscape photographs for analysis of environmental changes.

Deforestation is one of the major factors affecting soil erosion in tropical regions but to what extent does the crop growth in deforested areas protect the land from erosion? We evaluated the effect of deforestation on suspended sediment yields on the scale of zero‐order catchments by contrasting five paired small forest and cropland catchments at...

The hydro-geomorphology of mountain catchments is mainly determined by vegetation cover. This study was carried out to analyse the impact of vegetation cover dynamics on flooding and water balance in 11 steep (0.27-0.65 m m-1) catchments of the western Rift Valley escarpment of Northern Ethiopia, an area that experienced severe deforestation and de...

This paper investigates land-use/cover changes related to river dynamics in northern Ethiopia. Aerial photographs from 1965 to 1986, and SPOT images of 2007 and 2014 were used to extract land units. Land-use/cover changes took place in 48% of the entire landscape around the river across the last five decades. Changes related to swap accounted for 3...

Flooding, one of the most serious natural disasters, poses a significant threat to people’s lives and property. At present, the forecasting method uses simple snowmelt accumulation and has certain regional restrictions that limit the accuracy and timeliness of flood simulation and prediction. In this paper, the influence of accumulated temperature...

The arid and semi‐arid areas in Central Asia have scarce water resources and fragile ecosystems that are especially sensitive and vulnerable to climate change. Reliable information regarding future projections of change in climate is crucial for long‐term planning of water resources management and structural adjustment of agriculture in this region...

In geomorphology, PhotoScan is a software that is used to produce Digital Surface Models (DSMs). It constructs 3D environments from 2D imagery (often taken by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV)) based on Structure-from-Motion (SfM) and Multi-View Stereo (MVS) principles. However, unpublished computer-vision algorithms used, contain random elements whic...

We have investigated the relevance of the notion of "peripheralism" in the Beles basin. In this lowland border area of Ethiopia, important investments require an evaluation of their socioeconomic and ecological impacts in the light of Ethiopia's Climate-Resilient Green Economy (CRGE) strategy. We contrasted literature of different periods with fiel...

The systemic biases of Regional Climate Models (RCMs) impede their application in regional hydrological climate-change effects analysis and lead to errors. As a consequence, bias correction has become a necessary prerequisite for the study of climate change. This paper compares the performance of available bias correction methods that focus on the...

Understanding of the often complex forest cover change drivers, and the perceived and observed forest cover changes substantially contributes to the sustainable management of tropical forests. This paper aims at developing an integrated view on tropical forest cover change and its drivers by combining the perception of the stakeholders (farmers, fo...

Many geomorphological processes on talus slopes in alpine environments (such as debris flows, rock fall, rock glaciers and gelifluction) are related to permafrost distribution and typology. Therefore, it is expected that process dynamics will alter with climate change induced permafrost warming and degradation. In order to study this, very high res...

Abstract Despite the many studies on land degradation in the Highlands of Northern Ethiopia, quantitative information on long-term land use/cover (LUC) changes is rare. Hence, this study aims to investigate the changes of LUC in the Geba catchment (5142 km2), Northern Ethiopia, over 80 years. Aerial photographs (APs) of 1930s and Google Earth (GE)...

Marginal grabens are major development corridors in Ethiopia, and need to be understood for proper assessment of the hydrological budget. This study investigates the water balance of the Aba’ala graben (553 km²) in the period 2015–2016 under the challenge of data scarcity. We measured the rainfall and river discharge in order to analyse the runoff...

Gullies have been a common phenomenon in semi-arid northern Ethiopia for the last centuries. On the other hand, soil and water conservation (SWC) structures have been implemented since a long time to curb soil erosion. However, like most of the affected areas worldwide, density and distribution of gullies and SWC structures, their causes and interr...

The study of the causes of landscape dynamics is not a new phenomenon. However, less attention has been given to the quantification and degree of importance of each of the identified driving force. Hence, this study was undertaken with the objective of identifying the causes of landscape dynamics and quantifying the degree of importance of each of...

Lake sedimentation has a fundamental impact on lake lifetime. In this paper, we show how sensitive calculation of the latter is to the quality of data available and assumptions made during analysis. Based on the collection of a large new dataset, we quantify the sediment masses (1) mobilized on the hillslopes draining towards Lake Tana (Ethiopia),...

The hydro-geomorphology of mountain catchments is mainly determined by vegetation cover. This study was carried out to analyse the impact of vegetation cover dynamics on flooding and water balance in 11 steep (0.27-0.65 mm ⁻¹ ) catchments of the western Rift Valley escarpment of Northern Ethiopia, an area that experienced severe deforestation and d...