Deliniation of Slope Units based on Scale and Resolution Invariant 3D Curvature Extraction

Finding slope units for a given watershed is an important task before analyzing landslide susceptibility. Usually, slope unit generation requires integration of several digital elevation model (DEM)-based outputs obtained from GIS and related hydrological software. Therefore, it is time consuming due to involved steps and compilation of various software outputs. In this paper a DEM-based, scale and resolution invariant, fully automatic method is proposed for creating slope units to be used in landslide susceptibility mapping.

1. INTRODUCTION

Landslides, which are one of the major geohazards threatening the settlements, occur on the slopes of the terrain. In order to predict landslide occurrences, previously occurring landslides are related with several landslide susceptibility parameters and landslide susceptibility maps are obtained. Preparation of a landslide susceptibility map requires selection of appropriate slope mapping unit, which can be regular grids (pixels), slope units, unique condition areas or some morphological features. Among these mapping units, use of slope units has several advantages over other mapping units. As the landslides occur on the slopes grid (pixel)-based approaches let the analyzer to consider the areas which are not prone to landslides and hence decrease the performance of susceptibility mapping algorithms. Using slope units as landslide susceptibility mapping unit overcomes this problem.