A small-scale landslide susceptibility assessment for the territory of Western Carpathians

This study presented herein compares the bivariate and multivariate landslide susceptibility mapping methods and presents the landslide susceptibility map of the territory of Western Carpathians in small scale. This study also describes pioneer work for the territory of Western Carpathians, overreaching state borders, using verified sophisticated statistical methods. In the susceptibility mapping, digital elevation model was first constructed using a GIS software, and parameter maps affecting the slope stability such as geology, seismicity, precipitation, topographical elevation, slope angle, slope aspect and land cover were considered. In the last stage of the analyses, landslide susceptibility maps were produced using bivariate and multivariate analyses, and they were then compared by means of their validations. The validation of the bivariate analysis data was performed using the results of bivariate analysis for landslide areas of Slovakia containing five classes of susceptibility in scale 1:500,000. The validation area is the area of Western Carpathians within Slovakia. Eighty-two per cent of area does not differ in more than one class. The validation of the multivariate analysis data was performed using the results from the Kysuce region in the northern part of Slovakia in scale 1:10,000. The raster calculator was used to express the difference between each pair of pixels within these two layers. Seventy-seven per cent of the pixels do not differ in more than 25 %, 94 % of the pixels do not differ in more than 50 %. The maximal possible difference is 100 % (one pixel with value 0 and other with value 1, or vice versa). Receiver operating characteristic analysis was also performed, the area under curve value for bivariate model was calculated to be 0.735, while it was 0.823 for multivariate. The results of the validation can be considered as satisfactory.     

Rainfall event-based landslide susceptibility zonation mapping

Landslide susceptibility assessment is a major research topic in geo-disaster management. In recent days, various landslide susceptibility and landslide hazard assessment methodologies have been introduced with diverse thoughts of assessment and validation method. Fundamentally, in landslide susceptibility zonation mapping, the susceptibility predictions are generally made in terms of likelihoods and probabilities. An overview of landslide susceptibility zoning practices in the last few years reveals that susceptibility maps have been prepared to have different accuracies and reliabilities. To address this issue, the work in this paper focuses on extreme event-based landslide susceptibility zonation mapping and its evaluation. An ideal terrain of northern Shikoku, Japan, was selected in this study for modeling and event-based landslide susceptibility mapping. Both bivariate and multivariate approaches were considered for the zonation mapping. Two event-based landslide databases were used for the susceptibility analysis, while a relatively new third event landslide database was used in validation. Different event-based susceptibility zonation maps were merged and rectified to prepare a final susceptibility zonation map, which was found to have an accuracy of more than 77 %. The multivariate approach was ascertained to yield a better prediction rate. From this study, it is understood that rectification of susceptibility zonation map is appropriate and reliable when multiple event-based landslide database is available for the same area. The analytical results lead to a significant understanding of improvement in bivariate and multivariate approaches as well as the success rate and prediction rate of the susceptibility maps.     

A GIS-based landslide susceptibility evaluation using bivariate and multivariate statistical analyses

Bivariate and multivariate statistical analyses were used to predict the spatial distribution of landslides in the Cuyahoga River watershed, northeastern Ohio, U.S.A. The relationship between landslides and various instability factors contributing to their occurrence was evaluated using a Geographic Information System (GIS) based investigation. A landslide inventory map was prepared using landslide locations identified from aerial photographs, field checks, and existing literature. Instability factors such as slope angle, soil type, soil erodibility, soil liquidity index, landcover pattern, precipitation, and proximity to stream, responsible for the occurrence of landslides, were imported as raster data layers in ArcGIS, and ranked using a numerical scale corresponding to the physical conditions of the region. In order to investigate the role of each instability factor in controlling the spatial distribution of landslides, both bivariate and multivariate models were used to analyze the digital dataset. The logistic regression approach was used in the multivariate model analysis. Both models helped produce landslide susceptibility maps and the suitability of each model was evaluated by the area under the curve method, and by comparing the maps with the known landslide locations. The multivariate logistic regression model was found to be the better model in predicting landslide susceptibility of this area. The logistic regression model produced a landslide susceptibility map at a scale of 1:24,000 that classified susceptibility into four categories: low, moderate, high, and very high. The results also indicated that slope angle, proximity to stream, soil erodibility, and soil type were statistically significant in controlling the slope movement.     

A comparative evaluation of heuristic and bivariate statistical modelling for landslide susceptibility mappings in Ghurmi–Dhad Khola, east Nepal

Landslides are one of the major natural disasters that occur in the Himalayan range with recurring frequency, causing enormous loss of life and property every year. Preparation of landslide inventory maps and landslide susceptibility zonation maps are the important tasks to be taken into account initially for safe mitigation measures. The present paper focuses on landslide susceptibility maps of the Ghurmi–Dhad Khola area, east Nepal, using Geographic Information System. For this purpose, the landslide susceptibility maps are prepared by using the heuristic and bivariate statistical methods. The parameters considered for the study are slope angle, slope aspect, elevation, distance from drainage, geology, land cover, rock and soil type, and distance from faults and folds. The landslide susceptibility zonation map produced from the heuristic method shows that 42.59 % of the observed landslide falls under the very high susceptible zone and 33.00 % under the high susceptible zone. Likewise, the landslide susceptibility zonation map produced from the bivariate method depicts that 44.19 % of the observed landslide falls under the very high susceptible zone and 31.59 % under the high susceptible zone. Both the landslide susceptibility zonation maps are identical, and success rates of both the maps are above 80 %. While comparing the landslide susceptibility maps obtained from two different methods, about 78 % of the study area falls in the identical susceptible zones. Special attention should be taken into consideration for the construction works in the areas which have been spatially agreed as very high and high susceptible zones from both techniques. Moreover, these maps can be used for slope management, land use planning, disaster management planning, etc., by the concerned authorities.     

Landslides in Sado Island of Japan: Part II. GIS-based susceptibility mapping with comparisons of results from two methods and verifications

Slope instability research and susceptibility mapping is a fundamental component of hazard management and an important basis for provision of measures aimed at decreasing the risk of living with landslides. On this basis, this paper presents the result of a comprehensive study on slope stability analyses and landslide susceptibility mapping carried out in part of Sado Island of Japan. Various types of landslides occurred in the island throughout history. Little is known about the triggering factors and severity of old landslides, but for many of the recent slope failures, the slope characteristics and stratigraphy are such that ground surfaces retain water perennially and landslides occur when additional moisture is induced during rainfall and snowmelt. A range of methods are available in literature for preparation of landslide susceptibility maps. In this study we used two methods namely, the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) and logistic regression, to produce and later compare two susceptibility maps. AHP is a semi-qualitative method, which involves a matrix-based pair-wise comparison of the contribution of different factors for landsliding. Logistic regression on the other hand promotes a multivariate statistical analysis with an objective to find the best-fitting model that describes the relationship between the presence or absence of landslides (dependent variable) and a set of causal factors (independent parameters). Elevation, lithology and slope gradient were casual factors in this study. The determinations of factor weights by AHP and logistic regression were preceded by the calculation of class weights (landslide densities) based on bivariate statistical analyses (BSA). The differences between the AHP derived susceptibility map and the logistic regression counterpart are relatively minor when broad-based classifications are considered. However, with an increase in the number of susceptibility classes, the logistic regression map gave more details but the one derived by AHP failed to do so. The reason is that the majority of pixels in the AHP map have high values, and an increase in the number of classes gives little change in the spatial distribution of susceptibility zones in the middle. To verify the practicality of the two susceptibility maps, both of them were compared with a landslide activity map containing 18 active landslide zones. The outcome was that the active landslide zones do not completely fit into the very high susceptibility class of both maps for various reasons. But 70% of these landslide zones fall into the high and very high susceptibility zones of the AHP map while this is 63% in the case of logistic regression. This indicates that despite the skewed distribution of susceptibility indices, the AHP map was better to capture the reality on the ground than the logistic regression equivalent.     

Evaluation and comparison of GIS based landslide susceptibility mapping procedures in Kulekhani watershed, Nepal

The goal of this paper is to evaluate and compare the consistency of GIS-based heuristic and bivariate landslide susceptibility mapping techniques in the Himalayan region, taking the Kulekhani watershed of central Nepal as an example. For this purpose, a heuristic and two statistical bivariate landslide susceptibility mapping methods are applied, and three separate landslide susceptibility zonation maps are produced. The maps are compared using three approaches: landslide density analysis, success rate analysis, and agreed area analysis. A comparison of the values obtained from landslide density analysis and the curves of success rate analysis indicate that the two bivariate methods produce almost identical results, whereas the map produced with the heuristic method differs significantly from the others. On the other hand, the agreed area analysis highlights significant spatial differences in the maps obtained from the three methods. Although the three approaches evaluate the consistency of susceptibility maps, only the agreed area analysis is capable of spatially comparing them. Hence, this approach proves to be more suitable for spatially and quantitatively evaluating the consistency of various landslide susceptibility zonation maps.     

Use of Geomorphological Information in Indirect Landslide Susceptibility Assessment

The objective of this paper is to evaluate the importance of geomorphological expert knowledge in the generation of landslide susceptibility maps, using GIS supported indirect bivariate statistical analysis. For a test area in the Alpago region in Italy a dataset was generated at scale 1:5,000. Detailed geomorphological maps were generated, with legends at different levels of complexity. Other factor maps, that were considered relevant for the assessment of landslide susceptibility, were also collected, such as lithology, structural geology, surficial materials, slope classes, land use, distance from streams, roads and houses. The weights of evidence method was used to generate statistically derived weights for all classes of the factor maps. On the basis of these weights, the most relevant maps were selected for the combination into landslide susceptibility maps. Six different combinations of factor maps were evaluated, with varying geomorphological input. Success rates were used to classify the weight maps into three qualitative landslide susceptibility classes. The resulting six maps were compared with a direct susceptibility map, which was made by direct assignment of susceptibility classes in the field. The analysis indicated that the use of detailed geomorphological information in the bivariate statistical analysis raised the overall accuracy of the final susceptibility map considerably. However, even with the use of a detailed geomorphological factor map, the difference with the separately prepared direct susceptibility map is still significant, due to the generalisations that are inherent to the bivariate statistical analysis technique.     

Landslide susceptibility mapping using LiDAR and DMC data: a case study in the Three Gorges area, China

The objective of this study is to map landslide susceptibility in Zigui segment of the Yangtze Three Gorges area that is known as one of the most landslide-prone areas in China by using data from light detection and ranging (LiDAR) and digital mapping camera (DMC). The likelihood ratio (LR) and logistic regression model (LRM) were used in this study. The work is divided into three phases. The first phase consists of data processing and analysis. In this phase, LiDAR and DMC data and geological maps were processed, and the landslide-controlling factors were derived such as landslide density, digital elevation model (DEM), slope angle, aspect, lithology, land use and distance from drainage. Among these, the landslide inventories, land use and drainage were constructed with both LiDAR and DMC data; DEM, slope angle and aspect were constructed with LiDAR data; lithology was taken from the 1:250,000 scale geological maps. The second phase is the logistic regression analysis. In this phase, the LR was applied to find the correlation between the landslide locations and the landslide-controlling factors, whereas the LRM was used to predict the occurrence of landslides based on six factors. To calculate the coefficients of LRM, 13,290,553 pixels was used, 29.5 % of the total pixels. The logical regression coefficients of landslide-controlling factors were obtained by logical regression analysis with SPSS 17.0 software. The accuracy of the LRM was 88.8 % on the whole. The third phase is landslide susceptibility mapping and verification. The mapping result was verified using the landslide location data, and 64.4 % landslide pixels distributed in “extremely high” zone and “high” zone; in addition, verification was performed using a success rate curve. The verification result show clearly that landslide susceptibility zones were in close agreement with actual landslide areas in the field. It is also shown that the factors that were applied in this study are appropriate; lithology, elevation and distance from drainage are primary factors for the landslide susceptibility mapping in the area, while slope angle, aspect and land use are secondary.     

Landslide susceptibility mapping using certainty factor, index of entropy and logistic regression models in GIS and their comparison at Mugling�CNarayanghat road section in Nepal Himalaya

Landslide susceptibility maps are vital for disaster management and for planning development activities in the mountainous country like Nepal. In the present study, landslide susceptibility assessment of Mugling?CNarayanghat road and its surrounding area is made using bivariate (certainty factor and index of entropy) and multivariate (logistic regression) models. At first, a landslide inventory map was prepared using earlier reports and aerial photographs as well as by carrying out field survey. As a result, 321 landslides were mapped and out of which 241 (75?%) were randomly selected for building landslide susceptibility models, while the remaining 80 (25?%) were used for validating the models. The effectiveness of landslide susceptibility assessment using GIS and statistics is based on appropriate selection of the factors which play a dominant role in slope stability. In this case study, the following landslide conditioning factors were evaluated: slope gradient; slope aspect; altitude; plan curvature; lithology; land use; distance from faults, rivers and roads; topographic wetness index; stream power index; and sediment transport index. These factors were prepared from topographic map, drainage map, road map, and the geological map. Finally, the validation of landslide susceptibility map was carried out using receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves. The ROC plot estimation results showed that the susceptibility map using index of entropy model with AUC value of 0.9016 has highest prediction accuracy of 90.16?%. Similarly, the susceptibility maps produced using logistic regression model and certainty factor model showed 86.29 and 83.57?% of prediction accuracy, respectively. Furthermore, the ROC plot showed that the success rate of all the three models performed more than 80?% accuracy (i.e. 89.15?% for IOE model, 89.10?% for LR model and 87.21?% for CF model). Hence, it is concluded that all the models employed in this study showed reasonably good accuracy in predicting the landslide susceptibility of Mugling?CNarayanghat road section. These landslide susceptibility maps can be used for preliminary land use planning and hazard mitigation purpose.     

An assessment on the use of logistic regression and artificial neural networks with different sampling strategies for the preparation of landslide susceptibility maps

The main purpose of this study is to highlight the conceptual differences of produced susceptibility models by applying different sampling strategies: from all landslide area with depletion and accumulation zones and from a zone which almost represents pre-failure conditions. Variations on accuracy and precision values of the models constructed considering different algorithms were also investigated. For this purpose, two most popular techniques, logistic regression analysis and back-propagation artificial neural networks were taken into account. The town Ispir and its close vicinity (Northeastern part of Turkey), suffered from landsliding for many years was selected as the application site of this study. As a result, it is revealed that the back-propagation artificial neural network algorithms overreact to the samplings in which the presence (1) data were taken from the landslide masses. When the generalization capacities of the models are taken into consideration, these reactions cause imprecise results, even though the area under curve (AUC) values are very high (0.915 < AUC < 0.949). On the other hand, the susceptibility maps, based on the samplings in which the presence (1) data were taken from a zone which almost represents pre-failure conditions constitute more realistic susceptibility evaluations. However, considering the spatial texture of the final susceptibility values, the maps produced using the outputs of the back-propagation artificial neural networks could be interpreted as highly optimistic, while of those generated using the resultant probabilities of the logistic regression equations might be evaluated as pessimistic. Consequently, it is evident that, there are still some needs for further investigations with more realistic validations and data to find out the appropriate accuracy and precision levels in such kind of landslide susceptibility studies.     

Modeling debris flow initiation and run-out in recently burned areas using data-driven methods

In the framework of the landslide susceptibility assessment, the maps produced should include not only the landslide initiation areas, but also those areas potentially affected by the traveling mobilized material. To achieve this purpose, the susceptibility analysis must be separated in two distinct components: (1) The first one, which is also the most discussed in the literature, deals with the susceptibility to failure, and (2) the second component refers to the run-out modeling using the initiation areas as an input. Therefore, in this research we present a debris flow susceptibility assessment in a recently burned area in a mountain zone in central Portugal. The modeling of debris flow initiation areas is performed using two statistical methods: a bivariate (information value) and a multivariate (logistic regression). The independent validation of the results generated areas under the receiver operating characteristic curves between 0.91 and 0.98. The slope angle, plan curvature, soil thickness and lithology proved to be the most relevant predisposing factors for the debris flow initiation in recently burned areas. The run-out is simulated by applying two different methods: the empirical model Flow Path Assessment of Gravitational Hazards at a Regional Scale (Flow-R) and the hydrological algorithm D-infinity downslope influence (DI). The run-out modeling of the 36 initiation areas included in the debris flow inventory delivered a true positive rate of 83.5% for Flow-R and 80.5% for DI, reflecting a good performance of both models. Finally, the susceptibility map for the entire basin including both the initiation and the run-out areas in a scenario of a recent wildfire was produced by combining the four models mentioned above.     

滑坡灾害空间预测支持向量机模型及其应用

随着GIS技术在滑坡灾害空间预测研究中的广泛应用,滑坡灾害空间预测模型成为研究的热点问题。在总结滑坡灾害空间预测研究现状的基础上,简要介绍了两类和单类支持向量机的基本原理。以香港自然滑坡空间预测为例,采用两类和单类支持向量机进行滑坡灾害空间预测,并与Logistic回归模型进行了比较。结果表明,两类支持向量机模型优于Logistic回归模型,而Logistic回归模型优于单类支持向量机模型。     

Landslide susceptibility zonation mapping using logistic regression and its validation in Hashtchin Region,northwest of Iran

Landslide susceptibility zonation mapping assists researchers greatly to understand the spatial distribution of slope failure probability in a region. Being extremely useful in reducing landslide hazards, such maps could simply be produced using both qualitative and quantitative methods. In the present study, a multivariate statistical method called ‘logistic regression’ was used to assess landslide susceptibility in Hashtchin region, situated in west of Alborz Mountainsnorthwest of Iran. In this study, two independent variables, categorical (predictor) and continuous, were drawn on together in the model. To identify the region’s landslides use was made of aerial photographs, field studies and topographic maps. To prepare the database of factors affecting the region’s landslides and to determine landslide zones, geographic information system (GIS) was used. Using such information, landslide susceptibility modeling was accomplished. The data related to factors causing landslides were extracted as independent variables in each cell (in 50 m×50 m cells). Then, the whole data were input into the SPSS, Version 18. The prepared database was later analyzed using logistic regression, the forward stepwise method and based on maximum likelihood estimation. Regression equation was determined using obtained constants and coefficients and the landslide susceptibility of the area in grid-cells (pixels) was computed between 0 and 0.9954. The Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve was used to assess the accuracy of the logistic regression model. The predicting ability of the model was 84.1% given the area under ROC curve. Finally, the degree of success of landslide susceptibility zonation mapping was estimated to be 79%.     

Landslide susceptibility mapping using GIS-based multi-criteria decision analysis,support vector machines,and logistic regression

Identification of landslides and production of landslide susceptibility maps are crucial steps that can help planners, local administrations, and decision makers in disaster planning. Accuracy of the landslide susceptibility maps is important for reducing the losses of life and property. Models used for landslide susceptibility mapping require a combination of various factors describing features of the terrain and meteorological conditions. Many algorithms have been developed and applied in the literature to increase the accuracy of landslide susceptibility maps. In recent years, geographic information system-based multi-criteria decision analyses (MCDA) and support vector regression (SVR) have been successfully applied in the production of landslide susceptibility maps. In this study, the MCDA and SVR methods were employed to assess the shallow landslide susceptibility of Trabzon province (NE Turkey) using lithology, slope, land cover, aspect, topographic wetness index, drainage density, slope length, elevation, and distance to road as input data. Performances of the methods were compared with that of widely used logistic regression model using ROC and success rate curves. Results showed that the MCDA and SVR outperformed the conventional logistic regression method in the mapping of shallow landslides. Therefore, multi-criteria decision method and support vector regression were employed to determine potential landslide zones in the study area.     

Application of logistic regression and fuzzy operators to landslide susceptibility assessment in Azdavay (Kastamonu,Turkey)

Landslides and their assessments are of great importance since they damage properties, infrastructures, environment, lives and so on. Particularly, landslide inventory, susceptibility, and hazard or risk mapping have become important issues in the last few decades. Such maps provide useful information and can be produced by qualitative or quantitative methods. The work presented in this paper aimed to assess landslide susceptibility in a selected area, covering 570.625 km² in the Western Black Sea region of Turkey, by two quantitative methods. For this purpose, in the first stage, a detailed landslide inventory map was prepared by extensive field studies. A total of 96 landslides were mapped during these studies. To perform landslide susceptibility analyses, six input parameters such as topographical elevation, lithology, land use, slope, aspect and distance to streams were considered. Two quantitative methods, logistic regression and fuzzy approach, were used to assess landslide susceptibility in the selected area. For the fuzzy approach, the fuzzy and, or, algebraic product, algebraic sum and gamma operators were considered. At the final stage, 18 landslide susceptibility maps were produced by the logistic regression and fuzzy operators in a GIS (Geographic Information System) environment. Two performance indicators such as ROC (relative operating characteristics) and cosine amplitude method (r _ij ) were used to validate the final susceptibility maps. Based on the analyses, the landslide susceptibility map produced by the fuzzy gamma operator with a level of 0.975 showed the best performance. In addition, the maps produced by the logistic regression, fuzzy algebraic product and the higher levels of gamma operators showed more satisfactory results, while the fuzzy and, or, algebraic sum maps were not sufficient to provide reliable outputs.     

Ensemble-based landslide susceptibility maps in Jinbu area, Korea

Ensemble techniques were developed, applied and validated for the analysis of landslide susceptibility in Jinbu area, Korea using the geographic information system (GIS). Landslide-occurrence areas were detected in the study by interpreting aerial photographs and field survey data. Landslide locations were randomly selected in a 70/30 ratio for training and validation of the models, respectively. Topography, geology, soil and forest databases were also constructed. Maps relevant to landslide occurrence were assembled in a spatial database. Using the constructed spatial database, 17 landslide-related factors were extracted. The relationships between the detected landslide locations and the factors were identified and quantified by frequency ratio, weight of evidence, logistic regression and artificial neural network models and their ensemble models. The relationships were used as factor ratings in the overlay analysis to create landslide susceptibility indexes and maps. Then, the four landslide susceptibility maps were used as new input factors and integrated using the frequency ratio, weight of evidence, logistic regression and artificial neural network models as ensemble methods to make better susceptibility maps. All of the susceptibility maps were validated by comparison with known landslide locations that were not used directly in the analysis. As the result, the ensemble-based landslide susceptibility map that used the new landslide-related input factor maps showed better accuracy (87.11% in frequency ratio, 83.14% in weight of evidence, 87.79% in logistic regression and 84.54% in artificial neural network) than the individual landslide susceptibility maps (84.94% in frequency ratio, 82.82% in weight of evidence, 87.72% in logistic regression and 81.44% in artificial neural network). All accuracy assessments showed overall satisfactory agreement of more than 80%. The ensemble model was found to be more effective in terms of prediction accuracy than the individual model.     

GIS-based landslide susceptibility mapping using bivariate statistical analysis in Devrek (Zonguldak-Turkey)

Devrek town with increasing population is located in a hillslope area where some landslides exist. Therefore, landslide susceptibility map of the area is required. The purpose of this study was to generate a landslide susceptibility map using a bivariate statistical index and evaluate and compare the results of the statistical analysis conducted with three different approaches in seed cell concept resulting in different data sets in Geographical Information Systems (GIS) based landslide susceptibility mapping applied to the Devrek region. The data sets are created from the seed cells of (a) crowns and flanks, (b) only crowns, and (c) only flanks of the landslides by using ten different causative parameters of the study area. To increase the data dependency of the analysis, all parameter maps are classified into equal frequency classes based directly on the percentile divisions of each corresponding seed cell data set. The resultant maps of the landslide susceptibility analysis indicate that all data sets produce fairly acceptable results. In each data set analysis, elevation, lithology, slope, aspect, and drainage density parameters are found to be the most contributing factors in landslide occurrences. The results of the three data sets are compared using Seed Cell Area Indexes (SCAI). This comparison shows that the crown data set produces the most accurate and successful landslide susceptibility map of the study area.     

Geomorphology and landslide susceptibility assessment using GIS and bivariate statistics: a case study in southern Italy

In this article, the results of a study aimed to assess the landslide susceptibility in the Calaggio Torrent basin (Campanian Apennines, southern Italy) are presented. The landslide susceptibility has been assessed using two bivariate-statistics-based methods in a GIS environment. In the first method, widely used in the existing literature, weighting values (Wi) have been calculated for each class of the selected causal factors (lithology, land-use, slope angle and aspect) taking into account the landslide density (detachment zones + landslide body) within each class. In the second method, which is a modification of the first method, only the landslide detachment zone (LDZ) density has been taken into account to calculate the weighting values. This latter method is probably characterized by a major geomorphological coherence. In fact, differently from the landslide bodies, LDZ must necessarily occur in geoenvironmental classes prone to failure. Thus, the calculated Wi seem to be more reliable in estimating the propensity of a given class to generate failure. The thematic maps have been reclassified on the basis of the calculated Wi and then overlaid, with the purpose to produce landslide susceptibility maps. The used methods converge both in indicating that most part of the study area is characterized by a high–very high landslide susceptibility and in the location and extent of the low-susceptible areas. However, an increase of both the high–very high and moderate–high susceptible areas occurs in using the second method. Both the produced susceptibility maps have been compared with the geomorphological map, highlighting an excellent coherence which is higher using method-2. In both methods, the percentage of each susceptibility class affected by landslides increases with the degree of susceptibility, as expected. However, the percentage at issue in the lowest susceptibility class obtained using method-2, even if low, is higher than that obtained using method-1. This suggests that method-2, notwithstanding its major geomorphological coherence, probably still needs further refinements.     

Improvement of statistical landslide susceptibility mapping by using spatial and global regression methods in the case of More and Romsdal (Norway)

Statistical models are one of the most preferred methods among many landslide susceptibility assessment methods. As landslide occurrences and influencing factors have spatial variations, global models like neural network or logistic regression (LR) ignore spatial dependence or autocorrelation characteristics of data between the observations in susceptibility assessment. However, to assess the probability of landslide within a specified period of time and within a given area, it is important to understand the spatial correlation between landslide occurrences and influencing factors. By including these relations, the predictive ability of the developed model increases. In this respect, spatial regression (SR) and geographically weighted regression (GWR) techniques, which consider spatial variability in the parameters, are proposed in this study for landslide hazard assessment to provide better realistic representations of landslide susceptibility. The proposed model was implemented to a case study area from More and Romsdal region of Norway. Topographic (morphometric) parameters (slope angle, slope aspect, curvature, plan, and profile curvatures), geological parameters (geological formations, tectonic uplift, and lineaments), land cover parameter (vegetation coverage), and triggering factor (precipitation) were considered as landslide influencing factors. These influencing factors together with past rock avalanche inventory in the study region were considered to obtain landslide susceptibility maps by using SR and LR models. The comparisons of susceptibility maps obtained from SR and LR show that SR models have higher predictive performance. In addition, the performances of SR and LR models at the local scale were investigated by finding the differences between GWR and SR and GWR and LR maps. These maps which can be named as comparison maps help to understand how the models estimate the coefficients at local scale. In this way, the regions where SR and LR models over or under estimate the landslide hazard potential were identified.