Abstract
Landslide susceptibility mapping is essential for land-use activities and management decision making in hilly or mountainous regions. The existing approaches to landslide susceptibility zoning and mapping require many different types of data. In this study, we propose a fractal method to map landslide susceptibility using historical landslide inventories only. The spatial distribution of landslides is generally not uniform, but instead clustered at many different scales. In the method, we measure the degree of spatial clustering of existing landslides in a region using a box-counting method and apply the derived fractal clustering relation to produce a landslide susceptibility map by means of GIS-supported spatial analysis. The method is illustrated by two examples at different regional scales using the landslides inventory data from Zhejiang Province, China, where the landslides are mainly triggered by rainfall. In the illustrative examples, the landslides from the inventory are divided into two time periods: The landslides in the first period are used to produce a landslide susceptibility map, and those in the late period are taken as validation samples for examining the predictive capability of the landslide susceptibility maps. These examples demonstrate that the landslide susceptibility map created by the proposed technique is reliable.
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Acknowledgments
This study has been partially funded by the Science and Technology Department of Zhejiang Province (No. 2006C13024). We would like to thank the Natural Hazards reviewers for their valuable comments that have improved the paper. We also particularly thank Dr. Zhiming Lu of Los Alamos National Laboratory for his thorough and careful correction of an early draft of the manuscript.
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Li, C., Ma, T., Sun, L. et al. Application and verification of a fractal approach to landslide susceptibility mapping. Nat Hazards 61, 169–185 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-011-9804-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-011-9804-x