Application and verification of a fractal approach to landslide susceptibility mapping

Abstract

The existing methods for landslide susceptibility mapping, whether statistic method or physics-based method, require many data such as lithology, topography, soil properties, land use and so on. However, in many regions of the world, the abundance of data is not available, but the need for landslide susceptibility maps is great. For these regions, how should reliable susceptibility maps be produced from the limited data? We addressed the issue of the problem and developed a new landslide susceptibility analysis technique using historical landslide inventories and fractal statistics on a GIS platform. The aim of this article is to apply and verify the use of this new technique to landslide susceptibility mapping in the Zhejiang Province (101,800 km2 in area), China.