Landslide susceptibility analysis by means of event-based multi-temporal landslide inventories

Abstract

This study uses landslide inventory of a single typhoon event and Weight of Evidence (WOE) analysis to establish landslide susceptibility map of the Laonung River in southern Taiwan. Eight factors including lithology, elevation, slope, slope aspect, landform, Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), distance to geological structure, and distance to stream are used to evaluate the susceptibility of landslide. Effect analysis and the assessment of grouped factors showed that lithology, slope, elevation, and NDVI are the dominant factors of landslides in the study area. Landslide susceptibility analysis with these four factors achieves over 90% of the AUC (area under curve) of the success rate curve of all eight factors. Four landslide susceptibility models for four typhoons from 2007 to 2009 are established, and each model is cross validated. Results indicate that the best model should be constructed by using landslide inventory close to the landslide occurrence threshold and should reflect the most common spatial rainfall pattern in the study region for ideal simulation and validation results. The prediction accuracy of the best model in this study reached 90.2%. The two highest susceptibility categories (very high and high levels) cover around 80% of the total landslides in the study area.