Abstract
Nowadays, natural hazards constitute an integral part in the everyday reality of people’s lives. A landslide event, although usually occurring at a low frequency (compared to other hazards), may develop into a major natural disaster involving extensive and adverse effects, both in the natural and man-made environment. Thus, by making this assumption and combining it with the human mentality that has the tendency to reassure and resist extreme physical processes, the underlying danger “in total”, is multiple of what is expected. Therefore, studying of this phenomenon is so important in many areas. Because of the climate conditions, geologic and geomorphologic characteristics of the region, the purpose of this study was the landslide hazard assessment by using Fuzzy Logic, Frequency Ratio and Analytical Hierarchy Process method in the Evritania prefecture. At first, landslides occurring in Evritania prefecture, were identified using a landslide database from Institute of Geology & Mineral Exploration of Greece and by primary field studies. The influence landslide factors used in this study were slope, aspect, elevation, lithology, precipitation, land cover, distance from faults and distance from rivers, were obtained from different sources and maps. Using these factors and the identified landslides, the fuzzy membership values were calculated by frequency ratio. Then, to account for the importance of each of the parameters in the landslide susceptibility, weights of each factor were determined based on the Analytical Hierarchy Process method. Finally, fuzzy map of each factor was multiplied to its weight that obtained using AHP method and at the end—for computing prediction accuracy—the produced map was verified by comparing to existing landslide locations. These results indicate that the three methods Fuzzy Logic, Frequency Ratio and Analytical Hierarchy Process method are relatively good estimators of landslide susceptibility in the study area. According to landslide susceptibility area map, about 50% of the occurred landslide fall into high and very high susceptibility zones and also approximately 21% of them indeed located in the low and very low susceptibility zones.
Highlights
Landslides, as one of the most important natural hazards, occur in many different areas throughout the world, in mountainous and hilly areas
These results indicate that the three methods Fuzzy Logic, Frequency Ratio and Analytical Hierarchy Process method are relatively good estimators of landslide susceptibility in the study area
Several algorithms and models have been proposed for generating landslide susceptibility, mainly including Analytical Hierarchy Process—(AHP) (Khezri, 2010), Logistic Regression (Carrara, 1983), Fuzzy Logic (Gee, 1991), Artificial Neural Network (ANN) analysis (Caniani et al, 2008), modeling approaches (Perriello Zampelli et al, 2012), Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process (Liu et al, 2007), Geographically weighted principal component analysis (Faraji Sabokbar et al, 2014) etc., most of which are related to the weight of landslide factors
Summary
Landslides, as one of the most important natural hazards, occur in many different areas throughout the world, in mountainous and hilly areas. Landslides cause the loss of life and property, damage natural resources and infrastructures such as road networks and bridges (Conforti et al, 2012). Landslide susceptibility is defined as the proneness of the terrain to produce slope failures and it is usually expressed in a cartographic way. A landslide susceptibility map depicts areas which likely have landslides in the future by correlating some of the principal factors that contribute to landslides with the past distribution of slope failures (Brabb, 1984). The above studies demonstrate that many techniques have been used for landslide susceptibility mapping and have achieved excellent results
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