A comparison of GIS-based landslide susceptibility assessment of the Satuk village (Yenice, NW Turkey) by frequency ratio and multi-criteria decision methods

Abstract

Landslide is one of the most influential natural disasters that cause losses of life and property on a large scale. To identify the landslide susceptible areas, the layers of data showing different characteristics of the earth must be evaluated together. In the course of evaluating data layers together, the emerging technology of geographical information systems (GIS) allows the collection, processing and analysis of data. The purpose of this study is to produce a landslide susceptibility map of the Satuk village in the Yenice district of the province of Karabuk in the Western Black Sea Region where landslides causing frequent loss of life and property occur frequently. In the area, the slope, lithology, aspect, elevation, distance to river and distance to road parameters were considered as the parameters causing the landslides. All of the parameters were standardized in a common scale using fuzzy membership functions. Then, the contributions of each of these parameters for the landslide occurrence were investigated by frequency ratio, and GIS-based multi-criteria decision analysis, and the weight values of the parameters were calculated. The generated landslide susceptibility map is divided into five classes. Additionally, the landslide inventory map was compared to the obtained landslide susceptibility maps to find out how well the constructed models fit the reality. An overlap of 81.56% was found based on the multi-criteria decision analysis method and an overlap of 89.96% was found based on the frequency ratio method. The results showed that the frequency ratio method provides better results than the multi-criteria decision analysis method considering the data used for the study area.