Susceptibility Mapping of Typical Geological Hazards in Helong City Affected by Volcanic Activity of Changbai Mountain, Northeastern China

Abstract

The purpose of this paper was to produce the geological hazard-susceptibility map for the Changbai Mountain area affected by volcanic activity. First, 159 landslides and 72 debris flows were mapped in the Helong city are based on the geological disaster investigation and regionalization (1:50,000) project of Helong City. Then, twelve landslide conditioning factors and eleven debris flow conditioning factors were selected as the modeling variables. Among them, the transcendental probability of Changbai Mountain volcanic earthquake greater than VI degrees was used to indicate the relationship between the geological hazard-susceptibility and Changbai Mountain volcanic earthquake occurrence. Furthermore, two machine learning models (SVM and ANN) were introduced to geological hazard-susceptibility modeling. Receiver operating characteristic curve, statistical analysis method, and five-fold cross-validation were used to compare the two models. Based on the modeling results, the SVM model is the better model for both the landslide and debris flow susceptibility mapping. The results show that the areas with low, moderate, high, and very high landslide susceptibility are 31.58%, 33.15%, 17.07%, and 18.19%, respectively; and the areas with low, moderate, high, and very high debris flow susceptibility are 25.63%, 38.19%, 23.47%, and 12.71%, respectively. The high and very high landslide and debris flow susceptibility classes make up 85.54% and 80.55% of the known landslides and debris flow, respectively. Moreover, the very high and high landslide and debris flow susceptibility are mainly distributed in the lower elevation area, and mainly distributed around the cities and towns in Helong City. Consequently, this paper will be a useful guide for the deployment of disaster prevention and mitigation in Helong city, and can also provide some reference for evaluation of landslide susceptibility in other volcanically active areas.