A landslide susceptibility map based on spatial scale segmentation: A case study at Zigui-Badong in the Three Gorges Reservoir Area, China

China experiences frequent landslides, and therefore there is a need for landslide susceptibility maps (LSMs) to effectively analyze and predict regional landslides. However, the traditional methods of producing an LSM are unable to account for different spatial scales, resulting in spatial imbalances. In this study, Zigui-Badong in the Three Gorges Reservoir Area was used as a case study, and data was obtained from remote sensing images, digital elevation model, geological and topographic maps, and landslide surveys. A geographic weighted regression (GWR) was applied to segment the study area into different spatial scales, with three basic principles followed when the GWR model was applied for this propose. As a result, 58 environmental factors were extracted, and 18 factors were selected as LSM factors. Three of the most important factors (channel network basic level, elevation, and distance to river) were used as segmentation factors to segment the study area into 18 prediction regions. The particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm was used to optimize the parameters of a support vector machine (SVM) model for each prediction region. All of the prediction regions were merged to construct a GWR-PSO-SVM coupled model and finally, an LSM of the study area was produced. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, the outcomes of the GWR-PSO-SVM coupled model and the PSO-SVM coupled model were compared using three evaluation methods: specific category accuracy analysis, overall prediction accuracy analysis, and area under the curve analysis. The results for the GWR-PSO-SVM coupled model for these three evaluation methods were 85.75%, 87.86%, and 0.965, respectively, while the results for the traditional PSO-SVM coupled model were 68.35%, 84.44%, and 0.944, respectively. The method proposed in this study based on a spatial scale segmentation therefore acquired good results.