Acailandia was founded in the late 60s, beside Belem-Brasilia Highway.

The city shows a high erosion risk, due to its sandy-loam soils, concentrated rainfall, irregular topography, deforestation and desorganized urbanization.

Due to those factors, several gullies have developed in the urban area. Therefore, a methodology was created to monitor the gully growth. Three gullies were selected and stakes were placed in the soil, approximately 10 metres from the gully border. The number of stakes depended on the size of the gully, being placed seventeen stakes in the largest gully, eight in a smaller one and seven in the smallest gully.

The monitoring period was between October-94 and August-95, that is, for eighteen months. The gully monitoring consisted of taking three measurements of the distance between each stake and the gully border. The use of a compass helps the measurements to be more accurate. Therefore, those measurements were taken in four epochs: October-94;January-95;May-95 and August-95.

A data-basis was created in order to plot diagrams for each gully. Through the diagrams it is possible to evaluate the speed and direction of the incision of each gully.

The created methodology for this research proved to be very useful to monitor gully growth because besides being very accurate, it is a relatively cheap way of investigating gully evolution.

Amongst the three gullies monitored, the one situated in the most urbanized area showed the quickest evolution, where some roads and houses were affected by the erosion process.