Landslide Susceptibility Mapping in the Vrancea-Buzău Seismic Region, Southeast Romania

This study presents the results of a landslide susceptibility analysis applied to the Vrancea-Buzău seismogenic region in the Carpathian Mountains, Romania. The target area is affected by a large diversity of landslide processes. Slopes are made-up of various types of rocks, climatic conditions can be classified as wet, and the area is a seismically active one. All this contributes to the observed high landslide hazard. The paper analyses the spatial component of the landslide hazard affecting the target area, the regional landslide susceptibility. First, an existing landslide inventory was completed to cover a wider area for the landslide susceptibility analysis. Second, two types of methods are applied, a purely statistical technique, based on correlations between landslide occurrence and local conditions, as well as the simplified spatial process-based Newmark Displacement analysis. Landslide susceptibility maps have been produced by applying both methods, the second one also allowing us to simulate different scenarios, based on various soil saturation rates and seismic inputs. Furthermore, landslide susceptibility was computed both for the landslide source and runout zones—the first providing information about areas where landslides are preferentially triggered and the second indicating where landslides preferentially move along the slope and accumulate. The analysis showed that any of the different methods applied produces reliable maps of landslide susceptibility. However, uncertainties were also outlined as validation is insufficient, especially in the northern area, where only a few landslides could be mapped due to the intense vegetation cover.

FRMOD, a Python tool for statistical landslide susceptibility assessment

Locating landslide-prone slopes is important, as landslides often threaten life or property where they occur. There is an abundance of statistical methods in the literature for estimating susceptibility to landslides, i.e., the likelihood of landslide occurrence based on the analyzed conditions. Still, there is a lack of readily available GIS tools for landslide susceptibility analysis, making it hard to reproduce or compare the results of different susceptibility assessments. The FRMOD is a Python-based tool for conducting landslide susceptibility analysis with the frequency ratio method. The frequency ratio method yields susceptibility estimates by comparing the frequency distributions of a set of variables from the sample landslide areas to the distributions for the whole study area. The estimates show the level of similarity to the sample landslides. The two main inputs of the tool are the raster grids of the analyzed continuous (e.g., elevation, slope) and thematic (e.g., lithology) variables and the mask grid that marks the landslide and the non-landslide areas. The analysis is performed with cross-validation to measure the predictive performance of the model. Data computed during the analysis is stored along the final susceptibility estimates and the supplementary statistics. The script reads and writes GDAL-compatible rasters, while the statistics can be saved as text files. Basic plotting functionalities for the grids and the statistics are also built-in to quicken the evaluation of the results. FRMOD enables the swift testing of different analysis setups and to apply the same analysis method for different areas with relative ease.