Landslide susceptibility prediction based on landform predisposing indexes − An example from the Beiluo River Basin

Abstract

The Beiluo River basin, which flows through the central part of the Loess Plateau, has experienced intense soil erosion and significant geomorphic change, which has provided favorable conditions for the occurrence of a large number of landslides. Landform indexes, which can express geomorphologic development state and internal rules, can transfer the development process information of surface morphology into the evaluation of landslide susceptibility, and help get more accurate landslide susceptibility prediction results. Taking the Beiluo River Basin as an example, a landslide susceptibility prediction model based on landform index is proposed by comparing the importance of landform index. In order to improve the accuracy of LSP, 10 kinds of general predictors indexes, 5 kinds of landform predisposing indexes and 1821 landslide points were compiled, and the geographic information system of Beiluo River Basin was constructed. Through the correlation test and CF model, the environmental indexes were evaluated to obtain the sensitive index results, and the combination of different environmental predictors indexes were classified according to the sensitive index results. Based on the combined classification results, the Max Entropy (MaxEnt) model was used to evaluate the Landslide susceptibility prediction (LSP), while the calculated results were evaluated and compared using the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve and landslide density. The results show that the vertical erosion factor, elevation, rainfall, horizontal erosion factor, slope angle and NDVI play a key role in controlling the spatial distribution of landslides in the study area. At the same time, the accuracy of landslide susceptibility is compared by AUC value. According to the calculation results, the Group5 (AUC = 0.803) with reasonable terrain index performs better in the training and test stages, and the relative accuracy is improved by 6.22 % compared with the non-introduction of terrain index and the omission rate difference is the best (omission rate difference = 0.0005), indicating that the introduction of landform index can effectively improve the landslide susceptibility prediction. The distribution of different sensitive areas was observed. The high sensitive areas and very high sensitive areas are mainly distributed in the southern Luochuan loess tableland and the northern Wuqi loess hilly area. The research results provide a scientific basis for landslide susceptibility prediction with rational introduction of landform indexes and regional infrastructure construction.