Tempo-Spatial Landslide Susceptibility Assessment from the Perspective of Human Engineering Activity

Abstract

The expansion of mountainous urban areas and road networks can influence the terrain, vegetation, and material characteristics, thereby altering the susceptibility of landslides. Understanding the relationship between human engineering activities and landslide occurrence is of great significance for both landslide prevention and land resource management. In this study, an analysis was conducted on the landslide caused by Typhoon Megi in 2016. A representative mountainous area along the eastern coast of China—characterized by urban development, deforestation, and severe road expansion—was used to analyze the spatial distribution of landslides. For this purpose, high-precision Planet optical remote sensing images were used to obtain the landslide inventory related to the Typhoon Megi event. The main innovative features are as follows: (i) the newly developed patch generating land-use simulation (PLUS) model simulated and analyzed the driving factors of land-use land-cover (LULC) from 2010 to 2060; (ii) the innovative stacking strategy combined three strong ensemble models—Random Forest (RF), Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), and Light Gradient Boosting Machine (LightGBM)—to calculate the distribution of landslide susceptibility; and (iii) distance from road and LULC maps were used as short-term and long-term dynamic factors to examine the impact of human engineering activities on landslide susceptibility. The results show that the maximum expansion area of built-up land from 2010 to 2020 was 13.433 km2, mainly expanding forest land and cropland land, with areas of 8.28 km2 and 5.99 km2, respectively. The predicted LULC map for 2060 shows a growth of 45.88 km2 in the built-up land, mainly distributed around government residences in areas with relatively flat terrain and frequent socio-economic activities. The factor contribution shows that distance from road has a higher impact than LULC. The Stacking RF-XGB-LGBM model obtained the optimal AUC value of 0.915 in the landslide susceptibility analysis in 2016. Furthermore, future road network and urban expansion have intensified the probability of landslides occurring in urban areas in 2015. To our knowledge, this is the first application of the PLUS and Stacking RF-XGB-LGBM models in landslide susceptibility analysis in international literature. The research results can serve as a foundation for developing land management guidelines to reduce the risk of landslide failures.