This study presents a landslide susceptibility assessment for the Caspian forest using frequency ratio and index of entropy models within geographical information system. First, the landslide locations were identified in the study area from interpretation of aerial photographs and multiple field surveys. 72 cases (70 %) out of 103 detected landslides were randomly selected for modeling, and the remaining 31 (30 %) cases were used for the model validation. The landslide-conditioning factors, including slope degree, slope aspect, altitude, lithology, rainfall, distance to faults, distance to streams, plan curvature, topographic wetness index, stream power index, sediment transport index, normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), forest plant community, crown density, and timber volume, were extracted from the spatial database. Using these factors, landslide susceptibility and weights of each factor were analyzed by frequency ratio and index of entropy models. Results showed that the high and very high susceptibility classes cover nearly 50 % of the study area. For verification, the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves were drawn and the areas under the curve (AUC) calculated. The verification results revealed that the index of entropy model (AUC = 75.59 %) is slightly better in prediction than frequency ratio model (AUC = 72.68 %). The interpretation of the susceptibility map indicated that NDVI, altitude, and rainfall play major roles in landslide occurrence and distribution in the study area. The landslide susceptibility maps produced from this study could assist planners and engineers for reorganizing and planning of future road construction and timber harvesting operations.

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Shallow landslides damage buildings and other infrastructure, disrupt agriculture practices, and can cause social upheaval and loss of life. As a result, many scientists study the phenomenon, and some of them have focused on producing landslide susceptibility maps that can be used by land-use managers to reduce injury and damage. This paper contributes to this effort by comparing the power and effectiveness of five machine learning, benchmark algorithms—Logistic Model Tree, Logistic Regression, Naïve Bayes Tree, Artificial Neural Network, and Support Vector Machine—in creating a reliable shallow landslide susceptibility map for Bijar City in Kurdistan province, Iran. Twenty conditioning factors were applied to 111 shallow landslides and tested using the One-R attribute evaluation (ORAE) technique for modeling and validation processes. The performance of the models was assessed by statistical-based indexes including sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, mean absolute error (MAE), root mean square error (RMSE), and area under the receiver operatic characteristic curve (AUC). Results indicate that all the five machine learning models performed well for shallow landslide susceptibility assessment, but the Logistic Model Tree model (AUC = 0.932) had the highest goodness-of-fit and prediction accuracy, followed by the Logistic Regression (AUC = 0.932), Naïve Bayes Tree (AUC = 0.864), ANN (AUC = 0.860), and Support Vector Machine (AUC = 0.834) models. Therefore, we recommend the use of the Logistic Model Tree model in shallow landslide mapping programs in semi-arid regions to help decision makers, planners, land-use managers, and government agencies mitigate the hazard and risk.

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Floods are some of the most destructive and catastrophic disasters worldwide. Development of management plans needs a deep understanding of the likelihood and magnitude of future flood events. The purpose of this research was to estimate flash flood susceptibility in the Tafresh watershed, Iran, using five machine learning methods, i.e., alternating decision tree (ADT), functional tree (FT), kernel logistic regression (KLR), multilayer perceptron (MLP), and quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA). A geospatial database including 320 historical flood events was constructed and eight geo-environmental variables—elevation, slope, slope aspect, distance from rivers, average annual rainfall, land use, soil type, and lithology—were used as flood influencing factors. Based on a variety of performance metrics, it is revealed that the ADT method was dominant over the other methods. The FT method was ranked as the second-best method, followed by the KLR, MLP, and QDA. Given a few differences between the goodness-of-fit and prediction success of the methods, we concluded that all these five machine-learning-based models are applicable for flood susceptibility mapping in other areas to protect societies from devastating floods.

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