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Landslide susceptibility mapping based on landslide history and analytic hierarchy process (AHP)

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Abstract

Landslide phenomena are responsible for significant economic damages, loss of human lives and irreversible changes in natural environment. In this manuscript, in a landslide-prone site of Cyprus, a landslide susceptibility model was developed by coupling the popular analytic hierarchy process and the frequency ratio method in a GIS environment. Initially, 10 triggering factors and their modified Landslide Relative Frequencies (mLRF) were determined. Then, AHP was employed so as to determine the relative weights of each landslide instability factor and to omit those that were not essential for the model. Land cover was the most important parameter in the manifestation of landslides, while a 0.00404 consistency ratio index value revealed that the weights of the landslide contributing factors were well assessed. By combining the landslide instability agents along with their weights, a landslide susceptibility map emerged illustrating that almost 64.1 % of the study area was expanded on high-risk zones. The ROC curves and La.M.I. index statistic measures were generated by utilizing a binary file of 977,500 pixels, which had incorporated equal areas of landslide cells and randomly selected non-landslide ones. The above measures indicated that the overall model accuracy in the detection of landslide phenomena was 73.9 % and the model’s performance was enhanced when the parameters with the smallest weights were omitted from the model. This information could be significant in undertaking the appropriate series of measures according to landslide susceptibility zones in order to mitigate the landslide risk in the area.

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Acknowledgments

The authors are thankful to the Cypriot authorities of the Department of Land and Surveys for providing the GIS data layers, the Geological Survey Department for providing the landslide datasets and the Department of meteorology from which the rainfall data were purchased. The authors would also like to acknowledge the Editor and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive suggestions and comments that improved the quality of this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Forestry and Natural Environment, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, University Campus 54124, PO Box 268, Thessaloníki, Greece

    Dimitrios Myronidis, Charalambos Papageorgiou & Stavros Theophanous

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  1. Dimitrios Myronidis
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  2. Charalambos Papageorgiou
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  3. Stavros Theophanous
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Correspondence to Dimitrios Myronidis.

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Myronidis, D., Papageorgiou, C. & Theophanous, S. Landslide susceptibility mapping based on landslide history and analytic hierarchy process (AHP). Nat Hazards 81, 245–263 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-015-2075-1

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