A novel model for regional susceptibility mapping of rainfall-reservoir induced landslides in Jurassic slide-prone strata of western Hubei Province, Three Gorges Reservoir area.

Jurassic facility-sliding strata have been identified as a fundamental factor affecting the occurrence of rainfall-reservoir induced landslides in western Hubei Province, China Three Gorges Reservoir area. Regional landslide susceptibility mapping is the most effective method for landslide prediction and mitigation. To solve the current problem of identifying the true landslides and non-landslides, a novel hybrid model based on the two steps self-organizing mapping-random forest (two steps SOM-RF) algorithm is proposed. The identified high and very high susceptibility zones are located within the hydro-fluctuation belt and regions with low altitude based on the datasets before 2014. Deviation and variance of other ten datasets are generated to evaluate the reliability of the maps for the problem of unbalanced sample sizes. Two typical landslides occurred in 2017 have been found in the very high susceptibility zone, which emphasized the validity of susceptibility mapping. To verify the effectiveness of selecting true landslides and non-landslides based on two steps SOM model, recorded landslides and non-landslides randomly chosen from landslide-free areas are put into the single RF model for comparison. The receiver operating characteristic curve and Accuracy index are applied to compare the performance of the landslide susceptibility maps created based on two steps SOM-RF and the single RF model. The results demonstrate that the consideration of true landslides and non-landslides is effective in producing a more accurate landslide susceptibility map with superior prediction skill and higher reliability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]