A Data-Driven Model on Google Earth Engine for Landslide Susceptibility Assessment in the Hengduan Mountains, the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau

Amplifying landslide hazards in the backdrop of warming climate and intensifying human activities calls for an integrated framework for accurately evaluating landslide susceptibility at fine spatiotemporal resolutions, which is critical for the mitigation of increasingly high landslide disaster risks. Yet, dynamic landslide susceptibility mapping is still lacking. Using high-quality data, from 14,435 landslides and non-landslides, we developed an efficient holistic framework for evaluating landslide susceptibility, considering landslide-relevant internal and external factors based on cloud computing platform and algorithmic models, which enables dynamic updating of a landslide susceptibility map at the regional scale, particularly in regions with highly complicated topographical features such as the Hengduan Mountains, as considered in this study. We compared Classification and Regression Trees (CART), Support Vector Machines (SVM), and Random Forest (RF) classifiers to screen out the best portfolio model for landslide susceptibility mapping on the Google Earth Engine (GEE) platform. We found that the Random Forest (RF) classifier integrated with synergy mode had the best modeling performance, with 90.48% and 89.24% accuracy and precision, respectively. We also found that forests and grasslands had the controlling effect on the occurrence of landslides, while human activities had a notable inducing effect on the occurrence of landslides within the Hengduan Mountains. This study highlights the performance of the holistic landslide susceptibility evaluation framework proposed in this study and provides a viable technique for landslide susceptibility evaluation in other regions of the globe.

Automated summary

This study developed an efficient framework for evaluating landslide susceptibility using high-quality data and cloud computing platform. The Random Forest classifier with synergy mode performed the best in modeling landslide susceptibility. The study also identified the controlling effect of forests and grasslands and the inducing effect of human activities on landslides in the Hengduan Mountains.