Landslide Susceptibility Evaluation Research Articles

Accuracy Improvement of Different Landslide Susceptibility Evaluation Models through K-Means Clustering: A Case Study on China’s Funing County

Landslides occur in most countries. As one of the most serious geological hazards, landslides affect infrastructure construction. Thus, it is vital to prepare reliable landslide susceptibility evaluation maps to avoid landslide-prone areas for various construction projects. In recent years, supervised machine learning algorithms have been widely used in landslide susceptibility evaluation, but many flaws remain in the selection of nonlandslide point samples for comparative analysis. It is significant to improve the authenticity of sample data and reduce the impact of noise. China’s Funing County was used as a case study in this paper, which first identified 122 landslide incidents based on historical data, fieldwork, and remote sensing images to create a landslide inventory in the research area. In addition, 12 causal factors of landslides were determined, including elevation, slope, aspect, plan curvature, profile curvature, distance to roads, distance to rivers, distance to faults, rainfall, normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), lithology, and land cover. K-means clustering was used to purify the factor data factors before data-driven certainty factor (CF) and frequency ratio (FR) models, and machine learning models, random forest (RF) and artificial neural network (ANN), were used for a comparative study on landslide susceptibility evaluation in Funing County. The results show that the selection method of nonlandslide sample data will affect the accuracy of different evaluation models. The purified sample data improved the prediction accuracy of the four models, with significant prediction accuracy improvements observed in the ANN model. The purification of nonlandslide sample data by K-means method is of great significance for the drawing of landslide sensitivity map.

Exploring the Potential of Portable Spectroscopic Techniques for the Biochemical Characterization of Roots in Shallow Landslides

In the present work, Raman, Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) and elemental Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS) spectroscopic techniques were used for the assessment of the influence of plant root composition towards shallow landslide occurrence. For this purpose, analyses were directly carried out on root samples collected from chestnut forests of the Garfagnana basin (northern Apennines, Italy) in different areas devoid and affected by shallow landslides due to frequent heavy rain events. Results have highlighted a correlation between the biochemical constituents of wooden roots and the sampling areas. In particular, different content of lignin/cellulose, as well as minerals nutrients, have been detected in roots collected where shallow landslides occurred, with respect to more stable areas. The results achieved are in line with the scientific literature which has demonstrated the link between the chemical composition of roots with their mechanical properties and, in particular, tensile strength and cohesion. Finally, portable spectroscopic instrumentations were employed without the need for either any sample preparation for Raman and LIBS spectroscopy or minimal preparation for FTIR spectroscopy. This novel and fast approach has allowed achieving information on the content of the major constituents of the root cell, such as cellulose and lignin, as well as their mineral nutrients. This approach could be reasonably included among the vegetation protection actions towards instability, as well as for the evaluation of shallow landslide susceptibility, combining geological, vegetational and biochemical parameters with sustainability.

Impact of Parameter Tuning with Genetic Algorithm, Particle Swarm Optimization, and Bat Algorithm on Accuracy of the SVM Model in Landslide Susceptibility Evaluation

As one of the most serious geological hazards, landslides affect infrastructure construction. Thus, it is vital to prepare reliable landslide susceptibility evaluation maps to avoid landslide-prone areas in construction projects. More studies on landslide susceptibility using machine learning have emerged in recent years, but there is a need to study ways to draw up high-precision evaluation maps. In this article, a 60 km oil pipeline in China’s Kunming was selected as the research area. The data of 141 landslide points in the research area were obtained through field work and data collection. Meanwhile, lithology, elevation, aspect, slope, stream power index, topographic wetness index, average annual rainfall from 2017 to 2021, distance to roads, and terrain roughness were selected as causal factors of landslide susceptibility in the research area. First, the information value method was used to quantify the impact of conditional factors on landslides. Genetic algorithm (GA), particle swarm optimization (PSO), and bat algorithm (BA) were then used for parameter tuning, and the support vector machine (SVM) was used to analyze landslide susceptibility in the research area. Finally, the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve was used to test the model performance after parameter tuning with GA, PSO, and BA. The results show that the area-under-the-curve (AUC) values obtained through SVM, GA-SVM, PSO-SVM, and BA-SVM are 81.1%, 86.2%, 89%, and 91.8%, respectively. SVM had the best performance after parameter tuning with the BA algorithm.

Analysis and Evaluation of Extreme Rainfall Trends and Geological Hazards Risk in the Lower Jinshajiang River

This research studied the risk assessment of geological hazards, such as landslides and debris flow, under the time series and trend characteristics of extreme precipitation events in the last 60 years in nine typical regions of the lower Jinshajiang River Basin. Nine indicators, including slope, engineering geological rock group, slope structure type, distance to road, topographic relief, distance to fault, distance to the water system, vegetation cover and profile curvature, were selected as the index factors for landslide susceptibility evaluation, and the information quantity method was used to obtain the landslide susceptibility evaluation of the study area. Based on the susceptibility evaluation, the spatial analysis function of GIS was used to derive the geological hazard zoning under the extreme rainfall trend. The results showed that the areas with high extreme rainfall trends have higher densities of geological hazard development and they are concentrated, while areas with low extreme rainfall trends have relatively less geological hazard development, and what development exists is scattered.

Application of Bagging, Boosting and Stacking Ensemble and EasyEnsemble Methods for Landslide Susceptibility Mapping in the Three Gorges Reservoir Area of China

Since the impoundment of the Three Gorges Reservoir area in 2003, the potential risks of geological disasters in the reservoir area have increased significantly, among which the hidden dangers of landslides are particularly prominent. To reduce casualties and damage, efficient and precise landslide susceptibility evaluation methods are important. Multiple ensemble models have been used to evaluate the susceptibility of the upper part of Badong County to landslides. In this study, EasyEnsemble technology was used to solve the imbalance between landslide and nonlandslide sample data. The extracted evaluation factors were input into three bagging, boosting, and stacking ensemble models for training, and landslide susceptibility mapping (LSM) was drawn. According to the importance analysis, the important factors affecting the occurrence of landslides are altitude, terrain surface texture (TST), distance to residences, distance to rivers and land use. The influences of different grid sizes on the susceptibility results were compared, and a larger grid was found to lead to the overfitting of the prediction results. Therefore, a 30 m grid was selected as the evaluation unit. The accuracy, area under the curve (AUC), recall rate, test set precision, and kappa coefficient of a multi-grained cascade forest (gcForest) model with the stacking method were 0.958, 0.991, 0.965, 0.946, and 0.91, respectively, which a significantly better than the values produced by the other models.

Analysis of Geological Hazard Susceptibility of Landslides in Muli County Based on Random Forest Algorithm

Landslides seriously threaten human life and property. The rapid and accurate prediction of landslide geological hazard susceptibility is the key to disaster prevention and mitigation. Traditional landslide susceptibility evaluation methods have disadvantages in terms of factor classification and subjective weight determination. Based on this, this paper uses a random forest model built using Python language to predict the landslide susceptibility of Muli County in western Sichuan and outputs the factor weight and model accuracy. The results show that (1) the three most important factors are elevation, distance from the road, and average annual rainfall, and the sum of their weights is 67.54%; (2) the model’s performance is good, with ACC = 99.43%, precision = 99.3%, recall = 99.48%, and F1 = 99.39%; (3) the landslide development and susceptibility zoning factors are basically the same. Therefore, this model can effectively and accurately evaluate regional landslide susceptibility. However, there are some limitations: (1) the landslide information statistical table is incomplete; (2) there are demanding requirements in terms of training concentration relating to the definition of landslide and non-landslide point sets, and the landslide range should be accurately delineated according to field surveys.

Landslide susceptibility evaluation and interpretability analysis of typical loess areas based on deep learning

Loess areas have a unique geological environment, and geological disasters occur there frequently. In this work, the typical loess area Lvliang was used as the study area. Using the historical landslide catalog, 12 influencing factors were chosen by integrating multisource heterogeneous spatiotemporal big data such as remote sensing, ground investigation, and basic geography. Based on frequency ratio (FR) and improved TabNet deep learning technology, landslide susceptibility evaluation and uncertainty analysis were performed. The results showed that the TabNet evaluation model using FR and self-supervised learning performs well and has the highest FR in extremely high-prone areas. Compared with other methods, this method has the highest scores in areas under the curve and susceptibility index distribution and the lowest uncertainty. Moreover, the SHAP method was used for interpretability analysis of the model. Therefore, this study can provide new ideas for landslide susceptibility management.

Landslide Susceptibility Evaluation of Machine Learning Based on Information Volume and Frequency Ratio: A Case Study of Weixin County, China.

A landslide is one of the most destructive natural disasters in the world. The accurate modeling and prediction of landslide hazards have been used as some of the vital tools for landslide disaster prevention and control. The purpose of this study was to explore the application of coupling models in landslide susceptibility evaluation. This paper used Weixin County as the research object. First, according to the landslide catalog database constructed, there were 345 landslides in the study area. Twelve environmental factors were selected, including terrain (elevation, slope, slope direction, plane curvature, and profile curvature), geological structure (stratigraphic lithology and distance from fault zone), meteorological hydrology (average annual rainfall and distance to rivers), and land cover (NDVI, land use, and distance to roads). Then, a single model (logistic regression, support vector machine, and random forest) and a coupled model (IV-LR, IV-SVM, IV-RF, FR-LR, FR-SVM, and FR-RF) based on information volume and frequency ratio were constructed, and the accuracy and reliability of the models were compared and analyzed. Finally, the influence of environmental factors on landslide susceptibility under the optimal model was discussed. The results showed that the prediction accuracy of the nine models ranged from 75.2% (LR model) to 94.9% (FR-RF model), and the coupling accuracy was generally higher than that of the single model. Therefore, the coupling model could improve the prediction accuracy of the model to a certain extent. The FR-RF coupling model had the highest accuracy. Under the optimal model FR-RF, distance from the road, NDVI, and land use were the three most important environmental factors, ac-counting for 20.15%, 13.37%, and 9.69%, respectively. Therefore, it was necessary for Weixin County to strengthen the monitoring of mountains near roads and areas with sparse vegetation to prevent landslides caused by human activities and rainfall.

A New Approach to Spatial Landslide Susceptibility Prediction in Karst Mining Areas Based on Explainable Artificial Intelligence

Landslides are a common and costly geological hazard, with regular occurrences leading to significant damage and losses. To effectively manage land use and reduce the risk of landslides, it is crucial to conduct susceptibility assessments. To date, many machine-learning methods have been applied to the landslide susceptibility map (LSM). However, as a risk prediction, landslide susceptibility without good interpretability would be a risky approach to apply these methods to real life. This study aimed to assess the LSM in the region of Nayong in Guizhou, China, and conduct a comprehensive assessment and evaluation of landslide susceptibility maps utilizing an explainable artificial intelligence. This study incorporates remote sensing data, field surveys, geographic information system techniques, and interpretable machine-learning techniques to analyze the sensitivity to landslides and to contrast it with other conventional models. As an interpretable machine-learning method, generalized additive models with structured interactions (GAMI-net) could be used to understand how LSM models make decisions. The results showed that the GAMI-net model was valid and had an area under curve (AUC) value of 0.91 on the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve, which is better than the values of 0.85 and 0.81 for the random forest and SVM models, respectively. The coal mining, rock desertification, and rainfall greater than 1300 mm were more susceptible to landslides in the study area. Additionally, the pairwise interaction factors, such as rainfall and mining, lithology and rainfall, and rainfall and elevation, also increased the landslide susceptibility. The results showed that interpretable models could accurately predict landslide susceptibility and reveal the causes of landslide occurrence. The GAMI-net-based model exhibited good predictive capability and significantly increased model interpretability to inform landslide management and decision making, which suggests its great potential for application in LSM.

Landslide Susceptibility mapping using random forest and extreme gradient boosting: A case study of Fengjie, Chongqing

Landslide susceptibility analysis can provide theoretical support for landslide risk management. However, some susceptibility analyses are not sufficiently interpretable. Moreover, the accuracy of many research methods needs to be improved. Therefore, this study can supplement these deficiencies. This study aims to research the evaluation effects of random forest (RF) and extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) classifier models on landslide susceptibility, and to compare their applicability in Fengjie County, Chongqing, a typical landslide‐prone area in southwest of China. Firstly, 1624 landslides information from 1980 to 2020 were obtained through field investigation, and a geospatial database of 16 conditional factors had been constructed. Secondly, non‐landslide points were selected to form a complete data set and RF and XGBoost models were established. Finally, the area under the ROC curve (AUC) value, accuracy, and F‐score were used to compare the two models. The results show that even though both classifiers have a highly accurate evaluation of landslide susceptibility, the RF model performs better. In comparison, the RF model has a higher AUC value of 0.866, and its accuracy and F‐score are approximately 2% higher than XGBoost. The land use, elevation, and lithology of Fengjie County contribute to the occurrence of landslides. This is due to human engineering activities (such as land reclamation, and housing construction) resulting in low slope stability and landslides in widely distributed sandstone, siltstone, and mudstone layers owing to their low permeability and planes of weakness.

Evaluation of landslide susceptibility based on VW-AHP-IV model: a case of Pengyang County, Ningxia, China

Landslide is one of the most common and severe geological disasters, which significantly endangers people's lives and properties. Therefore, adequate evaluation of landslide susceptibility is an important for disaster control and mitigation. We selected Pengyang County as the study area, and divided the indicators into different state levels by graded area ratio and landslide occurrence frequency distribution. Meanwhile, the levels of each indicator were assigned the unique scores according to the corresponding information values. Given that the issue of subjectivity in single AHP model significantly influence the model performance in landslide susceptibility prediction, a hybrid model, namely variable-weight based weighted information value (VW-AHP-IV) model, was applied in this paper for landslide susceptibility evaluation. The study area was classified into five classes by the natural breakpoint method: very high susceptibility area (8.26%), high susceptibility area (19.78%), medium susceptibility area (29.93%), low susceptibility area (31.57%) and very low susceptibility area (10.46%). In addition, this paper also discussed the influences of precipitation and human activities on landslide occurrence. According to the evaluation results and discussion, the study area was classified into three prevention and control areas: focus prevention and control area, sub-focus prevention and control area, and general prevention and control area. For each area, the corresponding prevention and control suggestions were proposed in order to reduce the occurrence of landslide disasters.

Insights into geospatial heterogeneity of landslide susceptibility based on the SHAP-XGBoost model

The spatial heterogeneity of landslide influencing factors is the main reason for the poor generalizability of the susceptibility evaluation model. This study aimed to construct a comprehensive explanatory framework for landslide susceptibility evaluation models based on the SHAP (SHapley Additive explanation)-XGBoost (eXtreme Gradient Boosting) algorithm, analyze the regional characteristics and spatial heterogeneity of landslide influencing factors, and discuss the heterogeneity of the generalizability of the models under different landscapes. Firstly, we selected different regions in typical mountainous hilly region and constructed a geospatial database containing 12 landslide influencing factors such as elevation, annual average rainfall, slope, lithology, and NDVI through field surveys, satellite images, and a literature review. Subsequently, the landslide susceptibility evaluation model was constructed based on the XGBoost algorithm and spatial database, and the prediction results of the landslide susceptibility evaluation model were explained based on regional topography, geology, and hydrology using the SHAP algorithm. Finally, the model was generalized and applied to regions with both similar and very different topography, geology, meteorology, and vegetation, to explore the spatial heterogeneity of the generalizability of the model. The following conclusions were drawn: the spatial distribution of landslides is heterogeneous and complex, and the contribution of each influencing factor on the occurrence of landslides has obvious regional characteristics and spatial heterogeneity. The generalizability of the landslide susceptibility evaluation model is spatially heterogeneous and has better generalizability to regions with similar regional characteristics. Further explanation of the XGBoost landslide susceptibility evaluation model using the SHAP method allows quantitative analysis of the differences in how much various factors contribute to disasters due to spatial heterogeneity, from the perspective of global and local evaluation units. In summary, the integrated explanatory framework based on the SHAP-XGBoost model can quantify the contribution of influencing factors on landslide occurrence at both global and local levels, which is conducive to the construction and improvement of the influencing factor system of landslide susceptibility in different regions. It can also provide a reference for predicting potential landslide hazard-prone areas and for Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) research.

Landslide susceptibility evaluation based on active deformation and graph convolutional network algorithm

Disastrous landslides have become a focus of the world’s attention. Landslide susceptibility evaluation (LSE) can predict where landslides may occur and has caught the attention of scientists all over the world. This work establishes integrated criteria of potential landslide recognition and combines the historical landslides and newly-identified potential landslides to improve the accuracy, rationality, and practicability of a LSE map. Moreover, slope units can well reflect the topographic constraint to landslide occurrence and development, and Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) can well portray the topological and feature relation among various slope units. The combination of slope units and GCN is for the first time employed in LSE. This work focuses on Wanzhou District, a famous landslide-serious region in the Three Gorges reservoir area, and employs multisource data to conduct potential landslide recognition and LSE and to reveal the distribution characteristics of high landslide susceptibility. Some new viewpoints are suggested as follows. 1) The established criteria of potential landslide recognition consist of the characteristics of active deformation, stratum and lithology, tectonics, topography, micro-geomorphology, environment, meteorology, earthquakes, and human engineering activity. These criteria can well eliminate 4 types of false alarm regions and is successfully validated by field survey. 2) 34 potential landslides are newly discovered, and the movement of these potential landslides were controlled or induced by the combined action of soft-hard interbedding rock mass, steep topography, frequent tectonic movement, strong fluvial erosion, abundant precipitation, and intensive road and building construction. 3) The GCN algorithm reaches a relatively high accuracy (AUC: 0.941) and outperforms the other representative machine learning algorithms of Convolutional Neural Network (AUC: 0.926), Support Vector Machine (AUC: 0.835), and CART Tree (AUC: 0.762). 4) High landslide susceptibility is caused by the coupled action of weathered rock cavities, soft rock and swelling soil, strong river erosion, abundant rainfall, and intensive human engineering activity.

A Combination of Deep Autoencoder and Multi-Scale Residual Network for Landslide Susceptibility Evaluation

Landslide susceptibility evaluation can accurately predict the spatial distribution of potential landslides, which offers great usefulness for disaster prevention, disaster reduction, and land resource management. Aiming at the problems of insufficient samples for landslide compilation, difficulty in expanding landslide samples, and insufficient expression of nonlinear relationships among evaluation factors, this paper proposes a new evaluation method of landslide susceptibility combining deep autoencoder and multi-scale residual network (DAE-MRCNN). In the first step, a deep autoencoder network was used to learn the feature expression of the original landslide data in order to acquire effective features in the data. Next, a multi-scale residual network was constructed; specifically, the model was improved into a deep residual network model by adding skip connections in the convolutional layer. In addition, the multi-scale idea was utilized to fully extract the scale characteristics of the evaluation factors. Finally, the model was used for feature training, and the results were input into the Softmax classifier to complete the prediction of landslide susceptibility. For this purpose, a machine learning method and two state-of-the-art deep learning methods, namely SVM, CPCNN-ML, and 2D-CNN, were utilized to model landslide susceptibility in Hanzhong City, Shaanxi Province. The proposed method produced the highest model performance of 0.891, followed by 0.842, 0.869, and 0.873. The experimental results show that the DAE-MRCNN method can fully express the complex nonlinear relationships among the evaluation factors, alleviate the problem of insufficient samples in convolutional neural networks (CNN) training, and significantly improve the accuracy of susceptibility prediction.

Optimizing the Sample Selection of Machine Learning Models for Landslide Susceptibility Prediction Using Information Value Models in the Dabie Mountain Area of Anhui, China

The evaluation of landslide susceptibility is of great significance in the prevention and management of geological hazards. The accuracy of the landslide susceptibility prediction model based on machine learning is significantly higher than that of traditional expert knowledge and the conventional mathematical statistics model. The correct and reasonable selection of non-landslide samples in the machine learning model greatly improves the prediction accuracy and reliability of the regional landslide susceptibility model. Focusing on the problem of selecting non-landslide samples in the machine learning model for landslide susceptibility evaluation, this paper proposes a landslide susceptibility evaluation method based on the combination of an information model and machine learning in traditional mathematical statistics. First, the influence factors for landslide susceptibility evaluation are screened by the correlation analysis method. Second, the information value model is used to delimit areas with low and relatively low landslide susceptibility, and non-landslide points are randomly selected. Third, a landslide susceptibility evaluation method combined with IV-ML, such as logistic regression (IV-LR), random forest (IV-RF), support vector machine (IV-SVM), and artificial neural network (IV-ANN), is established. Finally, the landslide susceptibility factors in the Dabie Mountain area of Anhui Province are analyzed, and the accuracy of the landslide susceptibility evaluation results using the IV-LR, IV-RF, IV-SVM, and IV-ANN and LR, RF, SVM, and ANN methods are compared. The accuracy is evaluated by examining the ACC, AUC, and kappa values of the model. The results indicate that the evaluation effect of the IV-ML models (IV-LR, IV-RF, IV-SVM, IV-ANN) on landslide susceptibility is significantly higher than that of the ML models (LR, RF, SVM, ANN).

A Hybrid Variable Weight Theory Approach of Hierarchical Analysis and Multi-Layer Perceptron for Landslide Susceptibility Evaluation: A Case Study in Luanchuan County, China

Landslides, which can cause significant losses of lives or property damages, result from several different environmental factors whose influences are very complex. Thus, the statistical multi-layer perceptron (MLP) and heuristic analytical hierarchy process (AHP) are employed in the evaluation of landslide susceptibility. However, the landslide susceptibility maps drawn by these two methods are always affected by subjectivity and randomness. In the present study, we introduce variable weight theory (VW) to improve the MLP and AHP methods, and two novel hybrid models, AHP-VW and MLP-VW, are respectively proposed. VW theory is used to redistribute the weights of the factors in the two constant weight evaluations. This is so that the weights of the factors change with different evaluation units, thereby eliminating the subjectivity and randomness problems. The landslide susceptibility maps of the study area were categorized into very low, low, moderate, high, and very high susceptibility grades. The landslide susceptibility maps of the four models are validated by the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve. The area under the curve (AUC) is 0.825 for the AHP model, 0.879 for the MLP model, 0.873 for the AHP-VW model, and 0.915 for the MLP-VW model. The results show that the landslide susceptibility map drawn by statistical MLP is better than that drawn by heuristic AHP, which is consistent with many other current research results. Furthermore, VW can significantly improve the performance of constant-weight single models. Landslide susceptibility maps drawn by the statistical MLP model hybrid VW can be used for regional land use planning and landslide hazard mitigation purposes.

Landslide susceptibility assessment using the certainty factor and deep neural network

Areas with vulnerable ecological environments often breed many geological disasters, especially landslides, which pose a severe threat to the safety of people’s lives and property in these areas. To aid in landslide prevention and mitigation, an approach combining the coefficient of determination method (CF) and a deep neural network (DNN) were proposed in this study for landslide susceptibility evaluation. The deep neural network can excavate the deep features of samples and improve the accuracy of the susceptibility model. In addition, the logistic regression model (LRM) and support vector machine (SVM) were selected to create landslide susceptibility maps for comparison, which also involved the coefficient of determination method (CF). Based on landslide remote sensing interpretation and field investigations, a spatial database of mudstone landslides in the Xining area was established. Eight different conditional factors, including the elevation, slope, slope aspect, undulation, curvature, watershed, distance from a fault, and distance from a road, in the study area were selected as the evaluation factors to evaluate the susceptibility. The results revealed that four factors (i.e., the ground elevation, curvature, distance from a fault, and distance from a road) had relatively significant influences on the landslide susceptibility in the study area. Finally, the confusion matrix was used to evaluate the accuracy of the results obtained using the three methods, and the optimal result was selected to evaluate the landslide susceptibility in the study area. It was found that the combined CF-DNN method was more suitable for evaluating the landslide susceptibility in this area. Landslide susceptibility zoning was conducted to divide the study area into four sensitivity levels: low (32.65%), medium (35.12%), high (22.44%), and extremely high (9.79%) susceptibility. The high-risk areas were primarily distributed in the high-elevation areas along the eastern edge of the Huangshui Basin.

Investigating the Effects of Cell Size in Statistical Landslide Susceptibility Modelling for Different Landslide Typologies: A Test in Central–Northern Sicily

Optimally sizing grid cells is a relevant research issue in landslide susceptibility evaluation. In fact, the size of the adopted mapping units influences several aspects spanning from statistical (the number of positive/negative cases and prevalence and resolution/precision trade-off) and purely geomorphological (the representativeness of the mapping units and the diagnostic areas) to cartographic (the suitability of the obtained prediction images for the final users) topics. In this paper, the results of landslide susceptibility modelling in a 343 km2 catchment for three different types of landslides (rotational/translational slides, slope flows and local flows) using different pixel-size mapping units (5, 8, 10, 16 and 32 m) are compared and discussed. The obtained results show that the higher-resolution model (5 m) did not produce the best performance for any of the landslide typologies. The model with 8 m sized pixels displayed the optimal threshold size for slides and slope flows. In contrast, for local flows, an increasing trend of model prediction accuracy was reached with 32 m pixels, which was a higher value than that presented using 8 m pixels. The variable importance analysis demonstrated that the better performance of the 8 m cells was due to their effectiveness in capturing morphological conditions which favour slope instability (profile curvature and middle and high ridges).

Assessment of earthquake-triggered landslide susceptibility considering coseismic ground deformation

The distance to the surface rupture zone has been commonly regarded as an important influencing factor in the evaluation of earthquake-triggered landslide susceptibility. However, the obvious surface rupture zones usually do not occur in some buried-fault earthquake cases, which means information about the distance to the surface rupture is lacking. In this study, a new influencing factor named coseismic ground deformation was added to remedy this shortcoming. The Mid-Niigata prefecture earthquake was regarded as the study case. To select a more suitable model for generating the landslide susceptibility map, three commonly used models named logistic regression (LR), artificial neural network (ANN), and support vector machine (SVM) were also conducted to assess landslide susceptibility. The performances of these three models were evaluated with the receiver operating characteristic curve. The calculated results showed that the ANN model has the highest area under the curve (AUC) value of 0.82. As the earthquake triggered more landslides in the epicenter area, which makes it more prone to landslides in further earthquakes, the susceptibility analysis at two different mapping scales (the whole study area and the epicenter area) was also applied.

Landslide susceptibility evaluation integrating weight of evidence model and InSAR results, west of Hubei Province, China

Landslides are common geological hazards that take a heavy toll on human life and infrastructure every year, making it crucial to identify potential landslides. Landslide susceptibility (LS) mapping evaluates landslide proneness with the help of static data (e.g., topography, geology, and hydrology) that hardly change over decades; whereas the ground deformation map (GDM) produced by Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) works as a powerful reinforcement for determining landslide threats. The integration of the two could prompt the evaluation of the LS, yet the existing joint approaches exhibit certain defects. Therefore, a novel LS evaluation approach integrating the weight of evidence (WOE) model and InSAR results was proposed in this study. First, the GDM of the study area was obtained through InSAR process; meanwhile, an initial LS map was produced using the WOE model; subsequently, the LS map was coupled with GDM to develop a refined zoning and identification of landslide hazards. The proposed method was applied in Enshi, China, and achieved a higher AUC of 0.869. In addition, the accuracy of the susceptibility level of geological hazards found during field survey of the study area was improved, indicating that the LS map generated using the proposed method is more sensitive to landslide hazards and produces more accurate results.