Abstract
BackgroundHigh basin of Oum Er Rbia River, which is located in Middle Atlas Mountain region, is prone to landslide problems due to the geological features combined with the climate change and human activities. The present work including inventory mapping was conducted to establish landslide susceptibility map using GIS-based spatial multicriteria approach. Eight landslide-related factors, including land cover, lithology, distance to road, distance to fault, distance to drainage network, elevation, aspect and slope gradient, were selected for the present assessment. Weight for each factor is assigned using Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) depending on its influence on the landslide occurrence. The landslide susceptibility map was derived using weighted overlay method and categorized into five susceptible classes namely, very low (VL), low (L), moderate (M), high (H).ResultThe results revealed that 30.16% of the study area is at very low risk, 12.66% at low risk, 25.75% of moderate risk, 22.59% of high risk and 9.11% of very high risk area coverage. The very high landslide vulnerability zones are more common within the river valleys on steep side slopes. Most landslides also involve rocks belonging to the Triassic weathered marl and clay-rich formation. Moreover, human activities namely the construction and the expansion of agricultural lands into forests intervene in inducing landslides through altering the slope stability along the river banks. Lastly, effectiveness of these results was checked by computing the area under ROC curve (AUC) that showed a satisfactory result of 76.7%.ConclusionsThe landslide susceptibility map of the Oum Er Rbia high basin provides valuable information about present and future landslides, which makes it viable. Such map may be helpful for planners and decision makers for land-use planning and slope management.
Highlights
High basin of Oum Er Rbia River, which is located in Middle Atlas Mountain region, is prone to landslide problems due to the geological features combined with the climate change and human activities
This study focused on producing landslide susceptibility map of Oum Er Rbia high basin (Morocco) by combining GIS techniques and Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method
Landslide susceptibility analysis can be done under the circumstance of having few existing data about the factors causing landslides using AHP method, which allows fast and practical analysis of landslides based on the collection of data and manipulation and the analysis of the necessary environmental data for landslide susceptibility
Summary
High basin of Oum Er Rbia River, which is located in Middle Atlas Mountain region, is prone to landslide problems due to the geological features combined with the climate change and human activities. Landslides are part of this natural process. As one of the most geological risks in the world, the landslides caused thousands of victims and deaths, hundreds of billion dollars of damages and environmental losses every year (Aleotti and Chowdhury 1999; Gutiérrez et al 2015). Several recent studies have developed several methodologies for assessing susceptibility to landslides showing that damage from natural processes is increased over the last decades
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have