The influence of land use and land cover change on landslide susceptibility: a case study in Zhushan Town, Xuan'en County (Hubei, China)

摘要

Land use and land cover change can increase or decrease landslidesusceptibility?(LS) in the mountainous areas. In the hilly and mountainouspart of southwestern China, land use and land cover change?(LUCC) hastaken place in the last decades due to infrastructure development and rapideconomic activities. This development and activities can worsen the slopesusceptible to sliding due to mostly the cutting of slopes. This study,taking Zhushan Town, Xuan'en County, as the study area, aims to evaluate theinfluence of land use and land cover change on landslide susceptibility at aregional scale. Spatial distribution of landslides was determined in termsof visual interpretation of aerial photographs and remote sensing images,supported by field surveys. Two types of land use and land cover?(LUC) maps,with a time interval covering 21?years?(1992–2013), were prepared: the first was obtained by the neural net classification of images acquired in?1992 and the second by the object-oriented classification of images in?2002 and?2013. Landslide-susceptible areas were analyzed using the logistic regression model (LRM) in which six influencing factors were chosen as the landslide susceptibility indices. In addition, the hydrologic analysis method was applied to optimize the partitioning of the terrain. The results indicated that the LUCC in the region was mainly the transformation from the grassland and arable land to the forest land, which is increased by 34.3%. An increase of 1.9% is shown in the area where human engineering activities concentrate. The comparison of landslide susceptibility maps among different periods revealed that human engineering activities were the most important factor in increasing?LS in this region. Such results emphasize the requirement of a reasonable land use planning activity process.