International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensin 
  
area. The quantitative data mainly comprised slope 
angle, slope length and direction of ploughing; and 
the main type of qualitative data used was the 
presence or absence of rills. 
The proportion of fields with rills was compared to 
the mean predicted soil loss for different classes of 
fields using a simple chi-square test. Not enough 
support was found that predicted soil loss and the 
presence or absence of rilling might be related. 
The reasons for the weak support for the application 
of the model are thought to be due to: 1) time lag 
between the prediction of soil losses (1992) and the 
field measurements (1999), 2) positioning errors 
surrounding the geographical locations of the fields 
and the pixels in the raster GIS, 3) potential 
mismatches between field sizes and pixel size, 4) the 
qualitative and partial nature of the field evidence 
used to compare with predicted soil loss. The biggest 
issue here probably lies in comparing a qualitative 
observation with a numerical prediction. 
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6. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 
This study was sponsored by the UK government and 
the BRDP (Jordan). I wish to thank my research 
associate Prof. Andrew C. Millington from Leicester 
University, for helping in structuring the project. My 
compliments go to the Director General of the RIGC, 
Engineer Saleem Khalifah for his continuous support 
to accomplish this research. I must acknowledge the 
help of the BRDP Director, Engineer Mohammad 
Shahbaz, for backing and encouraging this research 
from the beginning. My acknowledgements go to the 
United Arab Emirates University, my actual place of 
work, for allowing me to attend the XXth ISPRS 
Congress in Istanbul, Turkey to present my findings 
and results.