Susceptibility assessment of earthquake-triggered landslide in Wenchuan

The Ms 8.0 Wenchuan earthquake, occurred on 12 May 2008 in Sichuan Province, collapsed a great many houses and injured hundreds of thousands of people. Undoubtedly, it can be predicted that secondary earthquake landslides will draw much attention during a long time after the earthquake due to the severe geological hazard. In order to remove threat from the secondary disasters effectively, this study used techniques of remote sensing and GIS to generate susceptibility maps, taking the case of Wenchuan County. Seven factors controlling landslide occurrence have been taken account into the susceptibility assessment, including elevation, slop, aspect, lithology, seismic intensity, distance to faults and rivers. According to the probability that predicts the possibility of landslide occurrence calculated applying information value method and logistic regression separately, the study zone was ultimately categorized into five classes, specifically, "extremely low", "low", "moderate", "high" and "very high". These results have been proved to reflect closely the spatial distributions of landslides in the study area.