Morphological parameters causing landslides: A case study of elevation

The history of landslide susceptibility maps goes back about 50 years. Hazard and risk maps later followed these maps. Inventory maps provide the source of all these. There are different parameters selected specially for each field in the literature as well as parameters selected because they are easy to produce and obtain data. This study tried to research the effect of elevation on landslides by reviewing the literature in detail. The used class ranges and elevation values were reviewed and applied to map sections selected from Turkey. By analyzing the results, the goal was to determine at which elevation ranges landslides occurred. The study tried to investigate the effect of the parameter of elevation using data from the literature. It works to compare the elevation values for map sections selected to compare with the literature. The study comprises two stages. The first step tried to acquire statistical data by researching the data from the literature. The data were investigated in the second stage. For this purpose, close to 1.500 studies prepared between 1967 and 2019 were reviewed. According to the literature, the parameter of was used in analyses because it is easy to produce and is morphologically effective

Landslide Susceptibility Assessment of a Part of the Western Ghats (India) Employing the AHP and F-AHP Models and Comparison with Existing Susceptibility Maps

Landslides are prevalent in the Western Ghats, and the incidences that happened in 2021 in the Koottickal area of the Kottayam district (Western Ghats) resulted in the loss of 10 lives. The objectives of this study are to assess the landslide susceptibility of the high-range local self-governments (LSGs) in the Kottayam district using the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) and fuzzy-AHP (F-AHP) models and to compare the performance of existing landslide susceptible maps. This area never witnessed any massive landslides of this dimension, which warrants the necessity of relooking into the existing landslide-susceptible models. For AHP and F-AHP modeling, ten conditioning factors were selected: slope, soil texture, land use/land cover (LULC), geomorphology, road buffer, lithology, and satellite image-derived indices such as the normalized difference road landslide index (NDRLI), the normalized difference water index (NDWI), the normalized burn ratio (NBR), and the soil-adjusted vegetation index (SAVI). The landslide-susceptible zones were categorized into three: low, moderate, and high. The validation of the maps created using the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) technique ascertained the performances of the AHP, F-AHP, and TISSA maps as excellent, with an area under the ROC curve (AUC) value above 0.80, and the NCESS map as acceptable, with an AUC value above 0.70. Though the difference is negligible, the map prepared using the TISSA model has better performance (AUC = 0.889) than the F-AHP (AUC = 0.872), AHP (AUC = 0.867), and NCESS (AUC = 0.789) models. The validation of maps employing other matrices such as accuracy, mean absolute error (MAE), and root mean square error (RMSE) also confirmed that the TISSA model (0.869, 0.226, and 0.122, respectively) has better performance, followed by the F-AHP (0.856, 0.243, and 0.147, respectively), AHP (0.855, 0.249, and 0.159, respectively), and NCESS (0.770, 0.309, and 0.177, respectively) models. The most landslide-inducing factors in this area that were identified through this study are slope, soil texture, LULC, geomorphology, and NDRLI. Koottickal, Poonjar-Thekkekara, Moonnilavu, Thalanad, and Koruthodu are the LSGs that are highly susceptible to landslides. The identification of landslide-susceptible areas using diversified techniques will aid decision-makers in identifying critical infrastructure at risk and alternate routes for emergency evacuation of people to safer terrain during an exigency

National-Scale Rainfall-Triggered Landslide Susceptibility and Exposure in Nepal

Nepal is one of the most landslide-prone countries in the world, with year-on-year impacts resulting in loss of life and imposing a chronic impediment to sustainable livelihoods. Living with landslides is a daily reality for an increasing number of people, so establishing the nature of landslide hazard and risk is essential. Here we develop a model of landslide susceptibility for Nepal and use this to generate a nationwide geographical profile of exposure to rainfall-triggered landslides. We model landslide susceptibility using a fuzzy overlay approach based on freely-available topographic data, trained on an inventory of mapped landslides, and combine this with high resolution population and building data to describe the spatial distribution of exposure to landslides. We find that whilst landslide susceptibility is highest in the High Himalaya, exposure is highest within the Middle Hills, but this is highly spatially variable and skewed to on average relatively low values. Around 4 × 106 Nepalis (∼15\% of the population) live in areas considered to be at moderate or higher degree of exposure to landsliding (>0.25 of the maximum), and critically this number is highly sensitive to even small variations in landslide susceptibility. Our results show a complex relationship between landslides and buildings, that implies wider complexity in the association between physical exposure to landslides and poverty. This analysis for the first time brings into focus the geography of the landslide exposure and risk case load in Nepal, and demonstrates limitations of assessing future risk based on limited records of previous events

Landslides Hazard Mapping in Rwanda Using Bivariate Statistical Index Method

Landslides hazard mapping (LHM) is essential in delineating hazard prone areas and optimizing low cost mitigation measures. This study applied the Geographic Information System and statistical index method in LHM in Rwanda. Field surveys identified 336 points that were employed to construct a landslides inventory map. Ten landslides predicting factors were analyzed: normalized difference vegetation index, elevation, slope, aspects, lithology, soil texture, distance to rivers, distance to roads, rainfall, and land use. The factor variables were converted into categorized variables according to the percentile divisions of seed cells. Then, values of each factor’s class weight were calculated and summed to create landslides hazard map. The estimated hazard map was split into five hazard classes (very low, low, moderate, high, and very high). The results indicated that the northern, western, and southern provinces are largely exposed to landslides hazard. The major landslides hazard influencing factors are elevation, slope, rainfall, and poor land management. Overall, this LHM would help policy makers to recognize each area’s hazard extent, key triggering factors, and the required hazard mitigation measures. These measures include planting trees to enhance vegetation cover and reduce the runoff, and construction of buildings on low steep slope areas to reduce people’s hazard exposure; while agroforestry and bench terraces would reduce sediments that take out the exposed soil (erosion) and pollute water quality

An Iterative Classification and Semantic Segmentation Network for Old Landslide Detection Using High-Resolution Remote Sensing Images

Huge challenges exist for old landslide detection because their morphology features have been partially or strongly transformed over a long time and have little difference from their surrounding. Besides, small-sample problem also restrict in-depth learning. In this paper, an iterative classification and semantic segmentation network (ICSSN) is developed, which can greatly enhance both object-level and pixel-level classification performance by iteratively upgrading the feature extractor shared by two network. An object-level contrastive learning (OCL) strategy is employed in the object classification sub-network featuring a siamese network to realize the global features extraction, and a sub-object-level contrastive learning (SOCL) paradigm is designed in the semantic segmentation sub-network to efficiently extract salient features from boundaries of landslides. Moreover, an iterative training strategy is elaborated to fuse features in semantic space such that both object-level and pixel-level classification performance are improved. The proposed ICSSN is evaluated on the real landslide data set, and the experimental results show that ICSSN can greatly improve the classification and segmentation accuracy of old landslide detection. For the semantic segmentation task, compared to the baseline, the F1 score increases from 0.5054 to 0.5448, the mIoU improves from 0.6405 to 0.6610, the landslide IoU improved from 0.3381 to 0.3743, and the object-level detection accuracy of old landslides is enhanced from 0.55 to 0.9. For the object classification task, the F1 score increases from 0.8846 to 0.9230, and the accuracy score is up from 0.8375 to 0.8875

Development of regional landslide susceptibility models: a first step towards model transferability

Landslides are a globally pervasive problem with the potential to cause significant fatalities and economic losses. Although landslides are widespread, many at-risk regions may not have the high-quality data or resources used in most landslide susceptibility analyses. This study aims to develop regional susceptibility relationships that are versatile and use publicly available data and open-sourced software. Logistic Regression and Frequency Ratio susceptibility relationships were developed in 23 regions in Washington, Utah, North Carolina, and Kentucky, with a region referring to a unique area and data combination. Regions were diverse in their geology, morphology, climate, and nature and quality of their landslide data. The transferability of select models to regions uninvolved in model development was also tested. The transferred models were trained using data from a single region (single-region cross-validation) or a combination of regions (multi-region cross-validation). Potential landslide contributing factors were all derived from a globally available digital surface model while landslide inventories were publicly available from state geological surveys. The contributing factors considered were elevation, slope, aspect, planform curvature, profile curvature, and topographic position index. Models developed using high-quality landslide data delineating scarps, flanks, and individual slope movements performed very well (AUC 0.764 - 0.895; AUC = area under relative operating characteristics curve). Models developed using landslide data dominated by deposits performed less well, but at or near an acceptable level (AUC 0.67 – 0.81). Models developed using older, lower quality landslide data did not perform at an acceptable level (AUC 0.63 – 0.64). The results of testing model transferability had acceptable results for some but not all regions (AUC 0.563 - 0.844). This study is a promising first step in developing generalized landslide susceptibility relationships that can be used in areas that share similar regional scale attributes

Landslides in the Nepal Himalaya: a quantitative assessment of spatiotemporal characteristics, susceptibility, and landscape preconditioning

Mountainous regions such as the Himalaya are severely affected by landslides. Strategies to manage landslide hazard often rely on statistical landslide susceptibility models that forecast the locations of future landslides. Susceptibility models are typically space and/or time independent. However, recent observations suggest that several processes (i.e., earthquake preconditioning, path dependency) are capable of imparting transient controls on landslide occurrence that invalidate the assumption of time-independence. Consequently, it is vital to improve understanding of processes that influence landsliding through space and time, and to assess how these affect typical landslide susceptibility approaches. Therefore, this thesis aims to quantify the spatiotemporal characteristics, distributions, and preconditioning of monsoon-triggered landslides in the Nepal Himalaya, and how these factors influence regression-based susceptibility modelling. This aim is achieved by developing a 30-year inventory of ~12,900 monsoon-triggered landslides, which is used to: 1) assess the overall characteristics and distributions of monsoon-triggered landsides; 2) systematically quantify spatiotemporal variations in landslide processes and distributions, and how this influences landslide susceptibility modelling; 3) determine empirical relationships between monsoon-strength and landsliding to determine how earthquake preconditioning and cloud-outburst storms transiently perturb landslide rates in Nepal, and 4) recommend a best-practice framework for modelling landslide susceptibility in regions impacted by spatiotemporally varying landslide processes. Spatiotemporal variations in landslide occurrence are found to relate to permafrost degradation, path dependency, earthquake-preconditioning, and the occurrences of storms. Such variation significantly compromises the applicability and accuracy of regression-based susceptibility models, with models developed from specific regions or time slices incapable of consistently predicting other landslide data. However, susceptibility models developed using 6–8 years of landslide data offered consistently reliable prediction. Overall, it is recommended that typical space-time independent regression-based susceptibility models are avoided in dynamic mountainous regions unless developed with 6-8 years of multi-temporal landslide data and/or specific knowledge of any spatiotemporally varying landslide processes

Earthquake risk assessment using an integrated Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process with Artificial Neural Networks based on GIS: A case study of Sanandaj in Iran

Earthquakes are natural phenomena, which induce natural hazard that seriously threatens urban areas, despite significant advances in retrofitting urban buildings and enhancing the knowledge and ability of experts in natural disaster control. Iran is one of the most seismically active countries in the world. The purpose of this study was to evaluate and analyze the extent of earthquake vulnerability in relation to demographic, environmental, and physical criteria. An earthquake risk assessment (ERA) map was created by using a Fuzzy-Analytic Hierarchy Process coupled with an Artificial Neural Networks (FAHP-ANN) model generating five vulnerability classes. Combining the application of a FAHP-ANN with a geographic information system (GIS) enabled to assign weights to the layers of the earthquake vulnerability criteria. The model was applied to Sanandaj City in Iran, located in the seismically active Sanandaj-Sirjan zone which is frequently affected by devastating earthquakes. The Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) model was implemented in the IDRISI software and 250 points were validated for grades 0 and 1. The validation process revealed that the proposed model can produce an earthquake probability map with an accuracy of 95%. A comparison of the results attained by using a FAHP, AHP and MLP model shows that the hybrid FAHP-ANN model proved flexible and reliable when generating the ERA map. The FAHP-ANN model accurately identified the highest earthquake vulnerability in densely populated areas with dilapidated building infrastructure. The findings of this study are useful for decision makers with a scientific basis to develop earthquake risk management strategies