FRMOD, a Python tool for statistical landslide susceptibility assessment

Abstract

Abstract. Locating landslide-prone slopes is important, as landslides often threaten life or property where they occur. There is an abundance of statistical methods in the literature for estimating susceptibility to landslides, i.e., the likelihood of landslide occurrence based on the analyzed conditions. Still, there is a lack of readily available GIS tools for landslide susceptibility analysis, making it hard to reproduce or compare the results of different susceptibility assessments. The FRMOD is a Python-based tool for conducting landslide susceptibility analysis with the frequency ratio method. The frequency ratio method yields susceptibility estimates by comparing the frequency distributions of a set of variables from the sample landslide areas to the distributions for the whole study area. The estimates show the level of similarity to the sample landslides. The two main inputs of the tool are the raster grids of the analyzed continuous (e.g., elevation, slope) and thematic (e.g., lithology) variables and the mask grid that marks the landslide and the non-landslide areas. The analysis is performed with cross-validation to measure the predictive performance of the model. Data computed during the analysis is stored along the final susceptibility estimates and the supplementary statistics. The script reads and writes GDAL-compatible rasters, while the statistics can be saved as text files. Basic plotting functionalities for the grids and the statistics are also built-in to quicken the evaluation of the results. FRMOD enables the swift testing of different analysis setups and to apply the same analysis method for different areas with relative ease.