Ecosystem Services Assessment for Their Integration in the Analysis of Landslide Risk

Abstract

Landslides are disasters that cause damage to anthropic activities, innumerable loss of human life, and affect the natural ecosystem and its services globally. The landslide risk evaluated by integrating susceptibility and vulnerability maps has recently become a manner of studying sites prone to landslide events and managing these regions well. Developing countries, where the impact of landslides is frequent, need risk assessment tools to address these disasters, starting with their prevention, with free spatial data and appropriate models. However, to correctly understand their interrelationships and social affection, studying the different ecosystem services that relate to them is necessary. This study is the first that has been attempted in which an integrated application methodology of ecosystem services is used to know in a systematic way if the information that ecosystem services provide is useful for landslide risk assessment. For the integration of ecosystem services into the landslide risk evaluation, (1) eight ecosystem services were chosen and mapped to improve understanding of the spatial relationships between these services in the Guerrero State (México), and (2) areas of synergies and trade-offs were identified through a principal component analysis, to understand their influence on risk analysis better. These are extracted from the models of the ARIES platform, artificial intelligence, and big data platform. Finally, (3) the similarity between the risk characteristics (susceptibility and vulnerability, already mapped by the authors) and the ecosystem services assessment was analysed. The results showed that the ecosystem services that most affect the synergy are organic carbon mass and the potential value of outdoor recreation; meanwhile, the possible removed soil mass was the most important trade-off. Furthermore, the lowest similarity value was found between landslide vulnerability and ecosystem services synergy, indicating the importance of including these ecosystem services as a source of valuable information in the risk analysis methodologies, especially with respect to risk vulnerability.