Influences of the shadow inventory on a landslide susceptibility model

A landslide inventory serves as the basis for assessing landslide susceptibility, hazard, and risk. It is generally prepared from optical imagery acquired from spaceborne or airborne platforms, in which shadows are inevitably found in mountainous areas. The influences of shadow inventory on a landslide susceptibility model (LSM), however, have not been investigated systematically. This paper employs both the shadow and landslide inventories prepared from eleven Formosat-2 annual images from the I-Lan area in Taiwan acquired from 2005 to 2016, using a semiautomatic expert system. A standard LSM based on the geometric mean of multivariables was used to evaluate the possible errors incurred by neglecting the shadow inventory. The results show that the LSM performance was significantly improved by 49.21% for the top 1% of the most highly susceptible area and that the performance decreased gradually by 15.25% for the top 10% most highly susceptible areas and 9.71% for the top 20% most highly susceptible areas. Excluding the shadow inventory from the calculation of landslide susceptibility index reveals the real contribution of each factor. They are crucial in optimizing the coefficients of a nondeterministic geometric mean LSM, as well as in deriving the threshold of a landslide hazard early warning system.