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Abstract. Event-based landslide inventories are important for analyzing the relationship between the intensity of the trigger (e.g. rainfall, earthquake) and the density of the landslides in a particular area, as a basis for the estimation of the landslide probability and the conversion of susceptibility maps into hazard maps required for risk assessment. They are also crucial for the establishment of local rainfall thresholds that are the basis of Early Warning Systems, and for evaluating which land use/land cover changes are related to landslide occurrence. The completeness and accuracy of event-based landslide inventories are crucial aspects to derive at reliable results or the above types of analysis. In this study we generated a relatively complete landslide inventory for the 2018 Monsoon landslide event in the state of Kerala, India, based on two inventories that were generated using different methods: one based on Object Based Image Analysis (OBIA) and the other on field surveys of damaging landslides. We used a collaborative mapping approach based on the visual interpretation of pre-and post-event high-resolution satellite images available in Google Earth, adjusted the two inventories and digitize landslides that were missed in the two inventories. The reconstructed landslide inventory database contains 4728 landslides consisting of 2477 landslides mapped by OBIA method, 973 landslides mapped by field survey, 422 landslides mapped both by OBIA and field method and an additional 856 landslides mapped using the visual image (GE) interpretation. The dataset is available at https://doi.org/10.17026/dans-x6c-y7x2 (van Westen, 2020). Also, the location of the landslides was adjusted, based on the image interpretation, and the initiation points were used to evaluate the land use/land cover changes as a causal factor for the 2018 Monsoon landslides. A total of 45 % of the landslides that damaged buildings occurred due to cut-slope failure while 34 % of those impacting on roads were due to road cut-slope failures. The resulting landslide inventory is made available for further studies.

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Wildfires are one of the gravest and most momentous hazards affecting rich forest biomes worldwide; India is one of the hotspots due to its diverse forest types and human-induced reasons. This research aims to identify wildfire risk zones in two contrasting climate zones, the Wayanad Wildlife Sanctuary in the Western Ghats and the Kedarnath Wildlife Sanctuary in the Himalayas, using geospatial tools, analytical hierarchy process (AHP), and fuzzy-AHP models to assess the impacts of various conditioning factors and compare the efficacy of the two models. Both of the wildlife sanctuaries were severely battered by fires in the past, with more than 100 fire incidences considered for this modeling. This analysis found that both natural and anthropogenic factors are responsible for the fire occurrences in both of the two sanctuaries. The validation of the risk maps, utilizing the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) method, proved that both models have outstanding prediction accuracy for the training and validation datasets, with the F-AHP model having a slight edge over the other model. The results of other statistical validation matrices such as sensitivity, accuracy, and Kappa index also confirmed that F-AHP is better than the AHP model. According to the F-AHP model, about 22.49% of Kedarnath and 17.12% of Wayanad fall within the very-high risk zones. The created models will serve as a tool for implementing effective policies intended to reduce the impact of fires, even in other protected areas with similar forest types, terrain, and climatic conditions.

Flooding is one of the most destructive natural catastrophes that can strike anywhere in the world. With the recent, but frequent catastrophic flood events that occurred in the narrow stretch of land in southern India, sandwiched between the Western Ghats and the Arabian Sea, this study was initiated. The goal of this research is to identify flood-vulnerable zones in this area by making the local self governing bodies as the mapping unit. This study also assessed the predictive accuracy of analytical hierarchy process (AHP) and fuzzy-analytical hierarchy process (F-AHP) models. A total of 20 indicators (nine physical-environmental variables and 11 socio-economic variables) have been considered for the vulnerability modelling. Flood-vulnerability maps, created using remotely sensed satellite data and geographic information systems, was divided into five zones. AHP and F-AHP flood vulnerability models identified 12.29% and 11.81% of the area as very highvulnerable zones, respectively. The receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve is used to validate these flood vulnerability maps. The flood vulnerable maps, created using the AHP and F-AHP methods, were found to be outstanding based on the area under the ROC curve (AUC) values. This demonstrates the effectiveness of these two models. The results of AUC for the AHP and F-AHP models were 0.946 and 0.943, respectively, articulating that the AHP model is more efficient than its chosen counterpart in demarcating the flood vulnerable zones. Decision-makers and land-use planners will find the generated vulnerable zone maps useful, particularly in implementing flood mitigation plans.