Spatial distribution and susceptibility analyses of pre-earthquake and coseismic landslides related to the Ms 6.5 earthquake of 2014 in Ludian, Yunan, China

On 3 August 2014, an earthquake struck Ludian County, Yunnan Province, China, which has caused a large number of coseismic landslides. Visual interpretation permitted 284 and 1053 landslides before and after the event to be mapped, respectively. This work attempted to analyse these two kinds of landslides. Conditioning factors, such as slope angle, aspect, curvature, elevation, distance from drainages, intensity and lithology, and the index of Landslide Number Density (LND) were used to describe the spatial distribution of these landslides. Then, the pre-earthquake and coseismic landslide susceptibility maps were produced using the information value model. The areas under curve are 84.73 and 77.05%, for the pre-earthquake and coseismic landslides, respectively. The results show that the LND values as well as the information values of coseismic landslides are larger than those of the pre-earthquake case. This also indicates that this Ludian earthquake has a relatively larger ability to trigger landslides.