INFLUENCE OF DIGITAL ELEVATION MODEL RESOLUTION ON MAPPING TERRITORY SUSCEPTIBILITY TO LANDSLIDE DEVELOPMENT

Abstract

Link for citation: Van B. Duong, Fomenko I.K., Duc T. Ta, Trung K. Nguyen, Zerkal O.V., Gorobtsov D.N., Hong D. Vu. Influence of digital elevation model resolution on mapping territory susceptibility to landslide development. Bulletin of the Tomsk Polytechnic University. Geo Аssets Engineering, 2023, vol. 334, no. 8, рр. 164-181. In Rus. The relevance. Landslides are one of the most hazardous natural disasters in the world, causing significant economic damage and human deaths. For 20 years (1995–2014), 3876 landslides killed 163658 people and injured 11689 people, as reported by the U. Haque study (2019), based on the data from 128 countries. Excluding events triggered by earthquakes, the total number of fatal landslides from 2004 to 2016 was 4862, and most landslides (75 %) occurred in Asia. In Vietnam, particularly in the northern mountainous regions, landslides frequently caused considerable losses of life and property. The systematic evaluation of landslide hazards is a crucial component of Vietnam's disaster prevention strategy. The main aim of this study is to assess the landslide susceptibility of the Batxat district, Laocai province (Vietnam), using four digital elevation model resolutions (10, 30, 40, and 60 m) and nine landslide causative factors: slope aspect, elevation, slope, distance to roads, distance to faults, distance to drainage, average monthly precipitation, land use, and weathering crust. Object of the study is the landslide susceptibility in Batxat district, Laocai province, Vietnam. Methods: Certainty Factor method, fractal method. Results. The performed analyses indicated a statistically significant relationship between the distribution of landslides and the landslide causative factors in the study area. As a result, the territory was divided into five zones according to its susceptibility to the landslide process: very low, low, moderate, high, and very high. The very low landslide susceptibility zone is less than 10 % of the study area, while the very high susceptibility zone varies from 14,95 to 18,32 %, depending on the digital elevation model spatial resolution. Analysis of the Receiver Operating Characteristics curve revealed that all models, independent of digital elevation model resolution, have good prediction efficiency, with the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve over 70 %. In addition, the Receiver operating characteristic and fractal analysis results indicated that the model with a digital elevation model spatial resolution of 60 m has the highest accuracy. This significant conclusion may be explained by the fact that the accuracy of the landslide susceptibility assessment result is dependent not only on the digital elevation model resolution but also on the ratio of the digital elevation model resolution and the average area of landslides in the study area. This conclusion proves that it is necessary to depict landslide locations and their detailed morphological characteristics on the landslide inventory maps.