Transferring Google Earth observations to GIS-software: example from gully erosion study

High-resolution images available on Google Earth are increasingly being consulted in geographic studies. However, most studies limit themselves to visualizations or on-screen measurements. Google Earth allows users to create points, lines and polygons on-screen, which can be saved as KML files. Here, the use of R statistics freeware is proposed to easily convert these files to the shapefile format [or ‘.shp file format’], which can be loaded into GIS-software (ESRI ArcGIS 9 in our example). The geospatial data integration in GIS strongly increases the analysis possibilities.