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Published on: October 11, 2016
Global satellite analysis reveals landslide susceptibility peaks at intermediate vegetation density
Shaoxiong Yuan1, Quan Wang2, Qinghua Gong3
1Guangzhou Institute of Geography/Guangdong Emergency Technology Research Center for Geological Disasters, Guangdong Academy of Sciences, Guangzhou 510070, China.
Abstract:
Landslide hazard models worldwide assume that vegetation stabilizes slopes monotonically, so that denser vegetation always implies greater stability. Analyzing 12,459 rainfall-triggered landslides (2000-2024) with multi-source satellite data, we find a "vegetation paradox": landslide susceptibility does not decline monotonically with vegetation density but peaks within a critical transition zone (CTZ) at NDVI, 0.769-0.868-a unimodal, non-monotonic pattern. This zone concentrates 23.0% of the full 18,028-event inventory (33.2% of the 12,459 analyzed with reliable NDVI) and persists across biomes, climate zones, and slope classes (16.7%-44.5% CTZ prevalence across the gentle-to-steep range), and its upper boundary is stable across data-quality filtering, density smoothing, and simulated sensor noise. An independent grid-based Random Forest (R 2 = 0.446) independently places this maximum within the CTZ (mean NDVI, 0.860) without histogram binning; its coarse grid, however, captures only the rising limb and cannot resolve the decline above the CTZ.
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