Application of AHP Method for Mapping Slope Geomorphic Phenomena

Abstract

Landslides are common and frequent geomorphic phenomena for the plateau regions in Romania having important consequences, especially economic ones, that needs designing scientific and technical plans for landslide risk mitigation. For this, an important preliminary step is assessing and mapping the landslide susceptibility. This paper examines a plateau zone in eastern Romania providing such a map, based on the landslides inventory, the digital elevation model (DEM) and the thematic layers of several factors thought to be potential predictors of landslides occurrence: topographic features, land use, and lithology. The methodological framework is based on the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) principles and factors weights attributed based on frequency of landslides. The predictive performance of the model was assessed using the confusion matrix, the ROC (receiver operating characteristic) curve and the AUC (area under curve) parameter. The results indicate a good correspondence between the susceptibility estimated for the test samples and for the validation samples.