**2. Materials and methods**

#### **2.1 The study area**

With a superficial area of 68,200 hectares, the Menoua watershed is part of the Western Highlands of Cameroon. It is located on the southern slope of the Bamboutos Mountains between latitude 5° and 6° North of the equator and 9° and 10° of the Greenwich Meridian. Its average altitude varies between 700 m downstream and 2270 m upstream (**Figure 1**). It has a compactness index of around 2.107 [5], which reduces the response time of the basin to precipitation and promotes erosion. It receives an average annual rainfall amount of 1900 mm [6], characterized by both spatiotemporal irregularity and high intensity [7]. It has an irregular slope system that exceeds 15° on nearly 70% of the basin [8] and a reduced vegetation cover that now represents 28.35% of the catchment area [1].

Like in all of the Western Highlands, geological formations are mainly made up of products of volcanic eruptions (rhyolitic, trachytic, basaltic flows, and ignimbritic projections) of varying ages ranging from the tertiary to the current period [9]. These rocks consist of minerals with a fairly high degree of alterability [10]. The drainage density is high showing an impermeable lithology that favors surface runoff. The hydrographic network is of order 5, and therefore very active during intense and concentrated rains. However, it is a densely populated environment where agriculture is the main economic activity [11, 12]. Anthropogenic interventions remain the major process that directly influences the acceleration of water erosion processes on the slopes.

#### **2.2 Data and materials**

The analysis of soil sensitivity of the Menoua watershed was carried out on the basis of a set of data such as the Landsat 8 satellite image of 30 m spatial resolution h ttps://www.earthexplorer.org; the Bafoussam 1c and 1d topographic maps of 1/50,000 *Modeling of Soil Sensitivity to Erosion Using the Analytic Hierarchical Process: A Study… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.111742*

**Figure 1.** *Presentation and localization of the study zone.*

provided by the National Institute of Cartography; the soil map extracted from the morpho-pedological map of West Cameroon at 1/100,000, and data collected using a navigation GPS during fieldwork on the southern slopes of the Bamboutos Mountains in December 2021. This data collection have enabled the establishment of a Spatial Reference database. ArcGIS 10.3 and Envi 5.2 software were used for data processing.
