Landslide Susceptibility Mapping and Interpretation in the Upper Minjiang River Basin

Abstract

To enable the accurate assessment of landslide susceptibility in the upper reaches of the Minjiang River Basin, this research intends to spatially compare landslide susceptibility maps obtained from unclassified landslides directly and the spatial superposition of different types of landslide susceptibility map, and explore interpretability using cartographic principles of the two methods of map-making. This research using the catalogs of rainfall and seismic landslides selected nine background factors those affect the occurrence of landslides through correlation analysis finally, including lithology, NDVI, elevation, slope, aspect, profile curve, curvature, land use, and distance to faults, to assess rainfall and seismic landslide susceptibility, respectively, by using a WOE-RF coupling model. Then, an evaluation of landslide susceptibility was conducted by merging rainfall and seismic landslides into a dataset that does not distinguish types of landslides; a comparison was also made between the landslide susceptibility maps obtained through the superposition of rainfall and seismic landslide susceptibility maps and unclassified landslides. Finally, confusion matrix and ROC curve were used to verify the accuracy of the model. It was found that the accuracy of the training set, testing set, and the entire data set based on the WOE-RF model for predicting rainfall landslides were 0.9248, 0.8317, and 0.9347, and the AUC area were 1, 0.949, and 0.955; the accuracy of the training set, testing set, and the entire data set for seismic landslides prediction were 0.9498, 0.9067, and 0.8329, and the AUC area were 1, 0.981, and 0.921; the accuracy of the training set, testing set, and the entire data set for unclassified landslides prediction were 0.9446, 0.9080, and 0.8352, and the AUC area were 0.9997, 0.9822, and 0.9207. Both of the confusion matrix and the ROC curve indicated that the accuracy of the coupling model is high. The southeast of the line from Mount Xuebaoding to Lixian County is a high landslide prone area, and through the maps, it was found that the extremely high susceptibility area of seismic landslides is located at a higher elevation than rainfall landslides by extracting the extremely high susceptibility zones of both. It was also found that the results of the two methods of evaluating landslide susceptibility were significantly different. As for a same background factor, the distribution of the areas occupied by the same landslide occurrence class was not the same according to the two methods, which indicates the necessity of conducting relevant research on distinguishing landslide types.