Landslide Susceptibility Mapping Using Integrated Methods: A Case Study in the Chittagong Hilly Areas, Bangladesh

Abstract

Landslide susceptibility mapping is of critical importance to identify landslide-prone areas to reduce future landslides, causalities, and infrastructural damages. This paper presents landslide susceptibility maps at a regional scale for the Chittagong Hilly Areas (CHA), Bangladesh. The frequency ratio (FR) was integrated with the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) (FR_AHP) and logistic regression (LR) (FR_LR). A landslide inventory of 730 landslide locations and 13 landslide predisposing factors including elevation, slope, aspect, plan curvature, profile curvature, topographic wetness index (TWI), stream power index (SPI), land use/land cover, rainfall, distance from drainage network, distance from fault lines, lithology, and normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) were used. Landslide locations were randomly split into training (80%) and validation (20%) sites to support the susceptibility analysis. A safe zone was determined based on a slope threshold for logistic regression using the exploratory data analysis. The same number of non-landslide locations were randomly selected from the safe zone to train the model (FR_LR). Success and prediction rate curves and statistical indices, including overall accuracy, were used to assess model performance. The success rate curves show that FR_LR showed the highest area under the curve (AUC) (79.46%), followed by the FR_AHP (77.15%). Statistical indices also showed that the FR_LR model gave the best performance as the overall accuracy was 0.86 for training and 0.82 for validation datasets. The prediction rate curve shows similar results. The correlation analysis shows that the landslide susceptibility maps produced by FR and FR_AHP are highly correlated (0.95). In contrast, the correlation between the maps produced by FR and FR_LR was relatively lower (0.85). It indicates that the three models are highly convergent with each other. This study’s integrated methods would be helpful for regional-scale landslide susceptibility mapping, and the landslide susceptibility maps produced would be useful for regional planning and disaster management of the CHA, Bangladesh.