Landslide initiation and runout susceptibility modeling in the context of hill cutting and rapid urbanization: a combined approach of weights of evidence and spatial multi-criteria

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Rainfall induced landslides are a common threat to the communities living on dangerous hill-slopes in Chittagong Metropolitan Area, Bangladesh. Extreme population pressure, indiscriminate hill cutting, increased precipitation events due to global warming and associated unplanned urbanization in the hills are exaggerating landslide events. The aim of this article is to prepare a scientifically accurate landslide susceptibility map by combining landslide initiation and runout maps. Land cover, slope, soil permeability, surface geology, precipitation, aspect, and distance to hill cut, road cut, drainage and stream network factor maps were selected by conditional independence test. The locations of 56 landslides were collected by field surveying. A weight of evidence (WoE) method was applied to calculate the positive (presence of landslides) and negative (absence of landslides) factor weights. A combination of analytical hierarchical process (AHP) and fuzzy membership standardization (weighs from 0 to 1) was applied for performing a spatial multi-criteria evaluation. Expert opinion guided the decision rule for AHP. The Flow-R tool that allows modeling landslide runout from the initiation sources was applied. The flow direction was calculated using the modified Holmgren’s algorithm. The AHP landslide initiation and runout susceptibility maps were used to prepare a combined landslide susceptibility map. The relative operating characteristic curve was used for model validation purpose. The accuracy of WoE, AHP, and combined susceptibility map was calculated 96%, 97%, and 98%, respectively.