Original Paper
Landslides (2018) 15:465–474 Wei Luo I Cheng-Chien Liu
DOI 10.1007/s10346-017-0893-9
Received: 13 March 2017
Accepted: 1 September 2017 Innovative landslide susceptibility mapping supported
Published online: 10 September 2017
© Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany 2017
by geomorphon and geographical detector methods
Abstract Landslides are among the most common and dangerous
natural hazards in mountainous regions that can cause damage to
properties and loss of lives. Landslide susceptibility mapping (LSM) is a
critical tool for preventing or mitigating the negative impacts of land-
slides. Although many previous studies have employed various statis-
tical methods to produce quantitative maps of the landslide
susceptibility index (LSI) based on inventories of past landslides and
contributing factors, they are mostly ad hoc to a specific area and their
success has been hindered by the lack of a methodology that could
produce the right mapping units at proper scale and by the lack of a
general framework for objectively accounting for the differing contri-
bution of various preparatory factors. This paper addresses these issues
by integrating the geomorphon and geographical detector methods
into LSM to improve its performance. The geomorphon method, an
innovative pattern recognition approach for identifying landform ele-
ments based on the line of sight concept, is adapted to delineate ridge
lines and valley lines to form slope units at self-adjusted spatial scale
suitable for LSM. The geographical detector method, a spatial variance
analysis method, is integrated to objectively assign the weights of
contributing factors for LSM. Applying the new integrated approach
to I-Lan, Taiwan produced very significant improvement in LSI map-
ping performance than a previous model, especially in highly suscep-
tible areas. The new method offers a general framework for better
mapping landslide susceptibility and mitigating its negative impacts.
Keywords Landslide susceptibility
mapping . Geomorphon . Geographical detector . Slope
units . Frequency ratio . Weights
Introduction
Landslides are among the most common and dangerous natural
hazards in mountainous regions that can cause damage to prop-
erties and loss of lives (Hong et al. 2007; Domakinis et al. 2008;
Petley 2012). According to Petley (2012), between 2004 and 2010,
2620 fatal landslides were recorded globally, resulting in a total
death toll of at least 32,322. Landslides occur in all 50 states and US
territories, and cause more than $1 billion in damages and more
than 25 fatalities on average each year (https://landslides.usgs.gov/
learn/ls101.php). Many factors can contribute to landslides which
include preparatory factors such as geomorphic properties of the
land surface (e.g., slope angle, aspect, curvature), properties of
underlying soils and rocks, land use and land cover conditions,
vegetation cover, distance to geologic structures, drainage density,
and triggering factors such as intense rainfall or earthquake
(Costanzo et al. 2012). Human activities such as deforestation
and urbanization can also exacerbate landslide problems (Glade
2003; Reichenbach et al. 2014). Government agencies around the
world have developed various measures to mitigate and prevent
the losses due to landslides, including building engineering struc-
tures, planning evacuation routes, and issuing early warnings
(Parise and Gunn 2007; Highland and Bobrowsky 2008; Choi and
Cheung 2013). However, all of these measures depend on
identifying the areas within the landscape that have characteristics
making them susceptible to landsliding, i.e., landslide susceptibil-
ity mapping (LSM) (Liu et al. 2016).
There is an enormous amount of literature on LSM based on
various contributing or preparatory factors (Baum et al. 2005;
Glenn et al. 2006; Hong et al. 2006; Fourniadis et al. 2007; Hong
and Adler 2008; Godt et al. 2008; Shou et al. 2009; Kirschbaum
et al. 2009, 2010; Hong and Wan 2011; Shahabi and Hashim 2015;
Liu et al. 2016). The methodology can be roughly divided into
three categories: physically based, heuristically based, and statisti-
cally based. The physically based models for mapping landslide
hazard susceptibility use mechanical laws to analyze the slope
stability (i.e., evaluating a safety factor) from the perspective of
physical processes leading to the landslide event. The advantages
of these models are that they do not require long-term landslide
inventory data and are more useful in areas with incomplete
landslide inventories. However, such models require detailed data
of mechanical properties of soil and rock and the correct knowl-
edge of the failure mechanisms affecting the investigated slopes
(Canli et al. 2015), which is often only available for a small area or a
single slope and thus it is hard to generalize the result of such
models to a more regional level (van Westen et al. 2008). The
heuristically based approach produces a score or index based on
contributing factors and their weights determined by the experts
(van Westen et al. 2008), which suffers the limitation of subjectiv-
ity associated with the experts’ empirical ranking of the landslide
factors and may produce inconsistent results among different
experts. The statistically based approaches use various statistical
methods, such as discriminant analysis, logistic regression, neural
network analysis, and frequency ratio, among others, to produce a
quantitative map of a landslide susceptibility index (LSI) based on
past landslides and contributing factors (Lee 2007; Pardeshi et al.
2013; Wu et al. 2016). The statistical approach is objective and
quantitative and thus has become popular recently, partly because
more and more landslide inventory data can be obtained through
remote sensing technology. In addition, geographic information
systems (GIS) have made creating LSI maps a relatively easy task
through its map algebraic operations on different factor layers
(including digital elevation model (DEM)) (Hong et al. 2007;
Abella and Van Westen 2007; Godt et al. 2008; Shahabi and
Hashim 2015). However, many previous studies used cell-based
local parameters and did not consider the influence of neighboring
cells. A local cell may be stable based on its local parameters, but if
its upstream neighbors are unstable, the local cell may also be
susceptible to landslide failure. Some studies used the straight-line
distance to mainstreams (i.e., concentric multi-ringed buffer zones
around the main streams) to account for the influence of neigh-
boring cells (Fourniadis et al. 2007; van Westen et al. 2008). This
approach implies that cells within the same buffer zone around
main stream will have the same susceptibility, but in the real world
as tributaries join the mainstream along the way downstream, cells
with same distance from the mainstream may experience different
Landslides 15 & (2018) 465
 Original Paper
total flux of water, leading to different landslide susceptibility. To
address this problem, Liu et al. (2016) introduced a new region-
based total flux factor to better capture the influence of topogra-
phy and hydrology conditions of the neighboring and upstream
cells and improved the accuracy of LSM using the frequency ratio
method. However, most of the statistically based LSMs are devel-
oped for a specific area and their success has been hindered by the
lack of a methodology that could produce the right mapping units
at proper scale and by the lack of a general framework for objec-
tively accounting for the differing contribution of various prepa-
ratory factors. This paper addresses these issues by integrating the
geomorphon and geographical detector methods into LSM to
improve its performance. Geomorphon is a new method for clas-
sifying landform into different elements such as ridges and valleys
based on the line of sight concept in computer vision and can be
adapted to delineate ridge lines and valley lines, which can be used
to form slope units at self-adjusted spatial scale suitable for LSM.
The geographical detector is a spatial variance analysis technique
for assessing the relative importance of different factors control-
ling or contributing to a spatially distributed phenomena (such as
landslides or disease). We will describe these two methods in more
detail next and incorporate them into LSM by applying the new
approach to the study area of I-Lan, Taiwan.
Methods
Geomorphon method
Slope units are terrain units bounded by drainage and divide
lines (Carrara et al. 1991). Because slope units are related to the
hydrological and geomorphological conditions and processes
that shape natural landscapes, they are better suited for hydro-
logical and geomorphological studies, and for landslide suscep-
tibility mapping (Carrara et al., 1991). Although various methods
have been proposed to partition the slope surface into units that
are suitable for LSM (Carrara et al. 1991; Alvioli et al. 2016),
many issues still remain, e.g., how to extract the spatially ho-
mogeneous objects from a DEM at a proper scale (Drăguţ and
Blaschke 2006). The recently developed geomorphon method
(Jasiewicz and Stepinski 2013) offers a brand new way of classi-
fying the landform surface into meaningful objects based on the
principle of pattern recognition rather than differential geome-
try and thus has high computational efficiency. In addition, it
self-adapts to identify the most suitable spatial scale at each
location (Jasiewicz and Stepinski 2013).
Using a DEM as input, the geomorphon method compares the
elevation of a target cell in the DEM with its surrounding cells
along eight compass directions out to a maximum search radius
and uses a ternary pattern to characterize the landform at a target
cell location (Fig. 1a). Figure 1b illustrates one such profile. The
maximum search radius is L. The search radius is incrementally
increased until it reaches the maximum L. l1 and φz1 in Fig. 1b show
one particular search radius and the corresponding zenith angle at
the search radius. After all the possible search radii and corre-
sponding zenith angles are obtained, the algorithm finds the min-
imum zenith angle φz. In a similar fashion, the minimum nadir
angle φn is also obtained. The algorithm then compares the min-
imum zenith angle (φz) and minimum nadir angle (φn) to deter-
mine if the point under consideration is higher than, the same as,
or lower than the surrounding (Fig. 1b). In this process of finding
466 Landslides 15 & (2018)
the minimum zenith or nadir angle, the final radius (or scale) is
determined automatically (i.e., self-adaptive) for that location.
Dotted lines in Fig. 1a represent the maximum search radius, and
the dashed lines represent the final self-adapted radius. The cases
Bhigher,^ Bsame,^ and Blower^ are actually defined by comparing
the difference between the zenith and nadir angles and a flatness
threshold t (Jasiewicz and Stepinski 2013). If φn − φz > t, the
surrounding cell in a direction is higher than the target cell and
the ternary element in that direction is coded as B+^ (red dots); if
|φn − φz| < t, the surrounding cell in a direction is the same as the
target cell and the ternary element in that direction is coded as Bo^
(green dots); if φn − φz < − t, the surrounding cell in a direction is
lower than the target cell and the ternary element in that direction
is coded as B−^ (blue dots). The codes in eight compass directions
form a pattern (starting from the east direction and going coun-
terclockwise), e.g., the east cell in Fig. 1a has the pattern
Bo+++o+++^. There are a total of 498 unique patterns after
removing repetitions that are reflections or rotations of other
patterns. These 498 patterns are grouped into 10 elemental types
which represent typical terrain forms observed in nature (Fig. 1c)
(Jasiewicz and Stepinski 2013), including valleys and ridges, which
are important elements for mapping slope units. The advantages
of adapting this method for slope unit delineation are (1) it is self-
adaptive to find the most suitable spatial scale at each location and
(2) it is highly efficient. The details of how we adapted the method
to delineate slope units are described in the BStudy area and
result^ section.
The geomorphon method is implemented as an add-on module
to GRASS GIS software (https://grass.osgeo.org/grass70/manuals/
addons/r.geomorphon.html, source code is available at: http://
sil.uc.edu/cms/data/uploads/software_data/r.geom.zip); for small
DEMs it is also available as an online application (http://
sil.uc.edu/geom/app).
Geographical detector method
Previous studies in LSM are mostly ad hoc for a particular area
and lack a universal framework for objectively accounting for the
nature of the data (e.g., continuous vs. categorical variables) and
their different contributions (Shahabi and Hashim 2015). The
geographical detector method is a spatial variance analysis method
developed in health geography to identify potential factors leading
to a health outcome (e.g., healthy or sick) or disease (Wang et al.
2010) and to assess each factor’s relative importance. This method
has been successfully adapted to study the factors controlling land
surface dissection patterns (Luo et al. 2016). It is employed here as
our theoretical framework to objectively assign weights between
different factors for mapping landslide susceptibility.
The general assumption for the geographical detector meth-
od is the following: if an environmental factor controls or
contributes to landslides, the spatial distribution of landslides
should be similar to that of the environmental factor. The
similarity between the two (or their spatial association) is mea-
sured by the so-called power of determinant (PD) that is deter-
mined by the local and global variances. Let X be a layer of data
representing an environmental factor (e.g., lithology or slope
angle) that we want to test for being a potential contributing
factor to landslides (Fig. 2). The spatial distribution of land-
slides can be quantified by landslide rate R, the ratio of land-
slide area within a slope unit relative to the area of the slope
 o+++o+++

(a)

(b)

(c)
Fig. 1 a Geomorphon line of sight concept and the ternary patterns (see text for more details). b A profile illustrating the minimum zenith angle (φz), minimum nadir
angle (φn), maximum search radius (L). The minimum angles are found by obtaining the zenith and nadir angles corresponding to series of search radii (l1) and find the
minimum of them. See text for more details. c Symbolic 3D morphologies and their corresponding Geomorphons (ternary patterns) for the 10 most common patterns
found in nature. Figure after Jasiewicz and Stepinski (2013)

unit. Because the geographical detector works with categorical the degree of spatial correspondence between layers X and R is
variables, X needs to be either already a categorical layer (e.g., measured by the power of determinant (PD) for factor X, PDX,
lithology) or able to be converted to categorical zones (e.g., which is defined as:
continuous slope angle can be categorized to into three zones:
gentle, moderate, and steep). Overlaying R and X layers subdi- 1
PDX ¼ 1− ∑L N z σ z 2 ð1Þ
vides R according to the zones of X (see Fig. 2). Nσ2 z¼1
If the factor X is associated with R, then R would exhibit a
spatial distribution similar to that of X. In the perfect case in
which factor X completely explains the pattern of R, the value where σz2 is the variance of R within zone z of factor X; Nz is
of R would be uniform across each zone of X and spatial number of sample units in zone z; σ2 is global variance of R in the
variance of R within all zones would be 0. In a realistic case, entire study area; N is the number of total samples in the entire

Fig. 2 Geographical detector method illustration. a Spatial distribution of landslide rate R. b Environmental factor X (e.g., slope) divided into three zones X1, X2, and X3.
c Overlay of R and X. The power of determinant (PD) is calculated based on variance of R within each zone of X and the global variance of R of the entire study area

Landslides 15 & (2018) 467

 Original Paper
study area; and L is the number of zones (categories) of factor X.
The standard definition of σz2 and σ2 apply here:
1  2
σz 2 ¼ ∑Ni¼1z Rz;i −Rz ð2Þ
N z −1
where Rz , i is the value of ith sample unit of R in zone z and Rz is
the mean of R in zone z.
1  2
σ2 ¼ ∑Nj¼1 R j −R ð3Þ
N−1
where Rj is the value of the jth sample unit from the entire study
area and R is the global mean of R over the entire study area.
Note that the second term in Eq. (1) is a ratio of the weighted sum of
local variance (weighted by the number of samples in each zone) to the
global variance. If factor X completely controls the spatial distribution
of R, local variance is 0 and PDX = 1 (assuming σ2 ≠ 0). If factor X is
completely unrelated to the spatial distribution of R, the weighted sum
of local variance is the same as the global variance and PDX = 0. In
general, PDX ∈ [0, 1] reflects the proportion of spatial variation of R
explained by the factor X. Higher values of PDX indicate higher affinity
of X and R. The power of determinant (PDX) is termed the Bfactor
detector^ (Wang et al. 2010) and addresses the question Bwhich envi-
ronmental factor is more strongly associated with the spatial distribu-
tion of R and thus could be a controlling factor?^ This method provides
an objective framework under which to select contributing factors and
account for their relative contribution (i.e., assign their weights) based
on the degree of spatial association measured by PD. The advantage of
this method is that it works for both categorical data and continuous
data (after discretization) and, unlike other statistical method such
regression analysis, it makes virtually no assumptions about the data
(Wang et al. 2016; Wang and Xu 2017). It has been proven very effective
at identifying potential factors controlling disease patterns and other
physical phenomena such as land surface dissection and desertification
(Wang et al. 2010; Huang et al. 2014; Luo et al. 2016; Du et al. 2016).
The free software for conducting geographical detector analysis
can be downloaded from http://www.geodetector.org/. The soft-
ware also tests the statistical significance of PD values (with the Bq-
statistics^) (Wang et al. 2016).
Study area and results
Study area and data
The study area is I-Lan, Taiwan, located in the northeastern part of
the island, covering roughly 400 km2. The elevation ranges from 10
Fig. 3 ArcGIS ModelBuilder tools used for generating valley/ridge lines based on Geomorphon elements. The yellow boxes represent ArcGIS tools. P indicates that the
input or output is Bparameter^ (or data layer) that can be changed by the user. The open oval (output drop) is an optional output that is not used here
468 Landslides 15 & (2018)
to 100 m above sea level at the coastal area to about 2000 m above
sea level in the Central Mountain area. Extreme precipitation
events, mostly brought by typhoon, are often observed on the
windward side, triggering many landslides in the study area. The
landslide inventory data covering the whole island of Taiwan have
been collected by a semi-automatic expert system, using the an-
nual composite of Formosat-2 imagery acquired from 2005 to 2015
(Liu 2006, 2015; Liu et al. 2016). During this period of time, there is
no significant earthquake, such as the Chi-Chi earthquake (mag-
nitude MW 7.6) in 1999. Since the landslide inventory data were
derived by means of remote sensing, most of them are shallow
landslide. However, there is no intention to separate them into
different sets (landslide types) caused by different triggering rain-
fall events. The landslides within the study area cover about a total
of 3 km2 or close to ~ 1% of the study area. The selected prepara-
tory factors are slope, aspect, lithology, and total flux. The slope,
aspect, and total flux are derived from a 5-m resolution DEM (Liu
et al. 2016). We selected these preparatory factors because they are
obtainable and applicable anywhere. This will make the resulting
LSM model more widely applicable. We did not use the landuse/
landcover as a factor because the landuse/landcover database al-
ready contain a category of landslide that is highly correlated with
our landslide inventory and including it would introduce an appar-
ent bias to the LSM (Liu et al. 2016). We did not select rainfall because
we consider rainfall as a triggering factor, not a preparatory factor.
Slope units delineation with geomorphon method
We applied the geomorphon method to the study area to delineate
the slope units. The whole process was automated as model using
ModelBuilder in ArcGIS, and the main parts are shown in Fig. 3.
After the geomorphon grid was created from the DEM, cells that
belong to the geomorphon types of valley or pit were selected to
represent valleys and cells that belong to the geomorphon types of
ridge and peak were selected to represent ridges. These selected
cells could not directly form slope units because they were Bfat^ at
some places and unconnected at other places (see Fig. 3b). Thus,
further processing was needed. Next, these cells were assigned a
value of 1 and used as weight for the BFlow Accumulation^ tool.
Thus only these selected cells contributed to the accumulation. For
generating neat valley lines, we used flow direction derived from
the DEM, and for ridge lines, we used flow direction from the
inverted DEM as inputs to the BFlow Accumulation^ tool. The flow
accumulation result was then thresholded (using the mean value
as threshold) and thinned to one cell width to produce the valley/
ridge lines with BThin^ tool in ArcGIS (Zhan 1993). Using the
geomorphon-derived valley/ridge cells as weight ensured that all
the morphologically visible valleys and ridges were extracted.
After the thinned valley and ridge grids were created, they were
converted to polyline features, which were then used to form the
slope unit polygons by using the BMerge,^ BExtend Line,^ and
BFeature To Polygon^ tools in ArcGIS (not shown in Fig. 3). The
final result is shown in Fig. 4c. There are a total of 531 slope units
generated in the study area after masking out the river channel
areas. For comparison, the slope unit polygons were also generat-
ed using a traditional method of intersecting watersheds formed
from DEM and inverted DEM (Fig. 4d) (Carrara et al. 1991). The
watersheds were generated using standard procedures, which in-
cluded filling the depressions in DEM (or inverted DEM). The
traditional method produced a total of 1558 slope units after the
same river channel masking. The zoomed-in areas (Fig. 4e, f)
shows that the slope units produced by the geomorphon method

Fig. 4 Slope unit creation using Geomorphon method (a–c) in comparison with a traditional method (d) and zoomed-in areas (e, f). a Valley and ridge cells based on
Geomrophon type (using a maximum search radius of 50 cells or about 2.5 km). b Zoomed-in of the boxed area in (a) showing valley and ridge lines (black) after running
the ModelBuilder tools shown in Fig. 3, along with the valley and ridge cells (red and blue). c Slope unit polygon formed by merging and extending valley and ridge lines
(zonal standard deviation of aspect is 34.9). d Slope unit generated by using intersection of watershed formed from DEM and inverted DEM (zonal standard deviation of
aspect is 41.9). e Zoom-in of the boxed area in (c). f Zoom-in of the boxed area in (d)

Landslides 15 & (2018) 469

 Original Paper
are visually more consistent with the topography because they are Table 1 PR values of the 4 factors and their between-factor weights
preconditioned by the ridge and valley lines based on geomorphon Factor j Slope Total Lithology Aspect
(Fig. 4b), whereas the traditional method produced some spurious flux
small polygons, perhaps resulted from inaccurate flow directions PDj 0.062 0.045 0.023 0.014
caused by the filling of DEM (or inverted DEM). In the new
Between-factor 0.43 0.31 0.16 0.10
method, we used the BExtend Line^ tool to close the polygons to
weight W BF j
form slope units. So there are some straight-line segments that
may not strictly follow the topography, but they are only a small
portion of the lines and the resulting slope units generally follow This result is generally consistent with our knowledge and expec-
the ridge and valley lines derived from geomorphon method and tation of the landslide contributing factors of the study area.
consistent with the overall topography. In fact, using zonal stan-
dard deviation of aspect (with slope units as zones) as a measure Calculating landslide susceptibility index
of the homogeneity within the slope units (Alvioli et al. 2016), our Frequency ratio has been commonly employed in the literature to
new method derived slope units generated a value of 34.9, lower weight different values within the same factor (Lee et al. 2002; Lee
than that of the traditional method derived slope units (41.9), and Sambath 2006; Lee and Pradhan 2007; Liu et al. 2016) and to
indicating more homogeneity within the geomorphon-based slope derive the LSI. This method assumes that the landslide inventory is
units. comprehensive enough to cover all kinds of landslide events; thus,
the frequency can be represented as an area ratio (Liu et al. 2016).
Incorporating the geographical detector method To implement the frequency ratio method, each factor X was
As discussed before, using the PD values of potential landslide converted to an integer grid and ArcGIS would automatically
factors calculated with the geographical detector method, we can produce a value attribute table listing the value and the count
select the factors with high PD values to participate in the LSM and (the number of cells with that value, or frequency). The area ratio
assign their weights objectively based on their PD values and their of each value i in factor X, ARi, is defined as
statistical significance (Wang et al. 2016). Based on comprehensive
literature review and the concept that the factors selected should
be obtainable and applicable anywhere, Liu et al. (2016) selected AR ≡ Ci ¼ Ci ; ð5Þ
i
slope angle, aspect, lithology, and total flux (a parameter account- Ct ∑ ni¼1 C i
ing for upstream flow contribution) as the major preparatory
landslide factors. Here, we adopt them as the preparatory factors
for easy comparison with the previous model and demonstrate where Ci is the count of cells with value i, Ct is the total number of
how the objectively assigned weights based on geographical detec- cells of the study area, n is the total number of integer values in X.
tor can improve the overall model. We used the conditional tool BCon^ to set the landslide areas to
After the slope units were obtained as described above, land- the value of factor X and no landslide area to Bno data^ (i.e.,
slide rate R for each slope unit was calculated as the ratio of essentially clipped the factor X grid to only the landslide area).
landslide area within the slope unit relative to the area of the slope The landslide ratio for factor X with value i, LRi, is defined as
unit. The four preparatory factors (Liu et al. 2016) were first
aggregated by slope units (using zonal means for the three con-
L L
tinuous factors: slope angle, aspect, and total flux and zonal LRi ≡ i ¼ n i : ð6Þ
majority for the categorical factor lithology). Note the result grids L t ∑ i¼1 Li

would still have the same resolution as the inputs, but the cells
within the same slope unit will have the same value. The three where Li is the count of factor X cells with value i that fall within
continuous factors were then discretized into seven zones (the landslide area, Lt is the total landslide area, n is the total number of
WF
same number of zones as lithology after aggregation by slope integer values in X. The within-factor weight W i for value i of
units) based on the quantile method (Cao et al. 2013). Next, we factor X is defined as the frequency ratio:
overlaid R with the four preparatory factors and calculated their LRi
WF
PD values. Their between-factor weights are assigned by normal- W i ≡ : ð7Þ
ARi
izing their PD values as follows:
After this, a new factor X′ was calculated by replacing each
value i in the original X with its corresponding within-factor
PD j
W Bj F ¼ ð4Þ weight value W WF
i . X′ is essentially a new version of factor X by
∑ Nj¼1 PD j converting its original value to corresponding within-factor
weights determined by the frequency ratio method.
The LSI for each slope unit was then calculated as a weighted
where W BFj is the between-factor weight for factor j; PDj is the PD
geometric mean based on the between-factor weights determined
value of factor j; N is the total number of factors (4 in this case). using Eq. (4) as follows:
The result is shown in Table 1. It is clear that slope angle is the

N   W Bj F
most important factor (with PD determined weight of 0.43), which LSI ¼ ∏ X j ′
: ð8Þ
is followed by total flux (0.31), lithology (0.16), and aspect (0.10). j¼1

470 Landslides 15 & (2018)

where W BF j is the between-factor weight for factor j; N is the total
number of factors. The result of our new method is shown in Fig. 5
in comparison with that of the old method (using cells as the basic
mapping units and unweighted geometric mean (Liu et al. 2016)).
It is clear that high LSI areas from our current method are much
more consistently aligned with the spatial distribution of previous
landslides (Fig. 5a) and the low LSI areas generally show no
previous landslides. In contrast, the previous method, using cells
as basic mapping units and unweighted geometric mean, produced
many high LSI areas where there were no previous landslides, i.e.,
false positives (Fig. 5b). This is demonstrated more clearly with an
enlarged view of the high susceptibility area (Fig. 5c, d).
To quantitatively assess the performance of the LSI, we
adopted the percentage of landslide occurrence (POLO) and its
cumulative (CPOLO), which are commonly used in the literature
to generate the success rate curve to measure the performance
of the LSI. The success rate curve is a graph generated by
plotting CPOLO against the LSI ranked from high to low: the
steeper the curve, the better the capability of LSI to predict
landslides (Chung and Fabbri 2003; Frattini et al. 2010; Oh
and Lee 2011). We follow this procedure to derive a success rate
curve for our new model (red line in Fig. 6) and for the
traditional cell-based unweighted model ((Liu et al. 2016), blue
line in Fig. 6). The area under the success rate curve can be used
to assess the overall prediction accuracy of the LSI (Oh and Lee
Fig. 5 (a) LSI map based on our new method (i.e., slope units derived from geomorphon and between-factor weights derived from geographical detector method). B LSI map
based on old method (i.e., based on cells and unweighted geometric mean [Liu et al. 2016]). c Zoom-in of the boxed area in (a). d Zoom-in of the boxed area in (b)
2011). The area under the curve for our new method (red line) is
86.5%, higher than the traditional cell-based unweighted meth-
od (blue line, 80.0%) (Fig. 6).
Looking at the highly susceptible area, where the most dam-
age to property and loss of lives occur, improvement is even
more impressive. For the case of the traditional model (based
on using cells as the basic mapping units and unweighted
geometric mean, blue line), the top 1% highly susceptible area
includes 6.8% of the total landslide area, the top 10% highly
susceptible area includes 42.1% of the total landslide area, and
the top 20% highly susceptible area covers more than 63.4% of
the total landslide area. For the case of our new model (based
on geomorphon-derived slope unit and weighted geometric
mean using weights derived from geographical detector method,
red line), the top 1% highly susceptible area includes 11.1% of the
total landslide area, the top 10% highly susceptible area includes
49.3% of the total landslide area, and the top 20% highly sus-
ceptible area covers more than 74.6% of the total landslide area.
This is visually shown in the zoomed-in view of a high suscep-
tible area: the traditional method predicted many non-slide
areas as highly susceptible, whereas the high susceptible areas
in the new model are generally more consistent with the land-
slide areas (Fig. 5c, d). To give a quantitative assessment of
improvement, we defined the percentage of improvement ρ as
shown below and illustrated in Fig. 6 (green line, right axis):
Landslides 15 & (2018) 471
 Original Paper
100
Cumulave percentage of landslide 100 search radius increases and using a larger radius makes practi-
90 90 cally no difference. In this study, a maximum search radius of

Percent of Improvement ( )
80 80 2.5 km was selected to achieve a reasonable balance between
70 70 capturing landform elements at various scales and the cost of
occurrence (%)

New (area under curve = 86.5)

60
Old (area under curve = 80.0)
50
40
30
20
10
0 0
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70
LSI Rank (%)
Fig. 6 Success rate curve for LSI based on our new model (red) and the traditional cell-
based unweighted model (blue). Also shown is the relative percentage of improvement
(green)
CPOLOnew − CPOLOold
ρ≡
CPOLOold
By integrating geomorphon-derived slope units and geographical
detector method derived between-factor weights into the new
LSI, its performance is significantly improved by ρ = 62.4% for
the top 1% highly susceptible area, ρ = 90.6% for the top 2%
highly susceptible area, ρ = 16.9% for the top 10% highly suscep-
tible area, and ρ = 17.7% for the top 20% highly susceptible area
(see Table 2).
Discussion and conclusion
This study incorporated two innovative methods (geomorphon
and geographical detector) into LSM and produced improved
performance, especially in high-risk areas. The geomorphon
method is underpinned by principles of machine vision rather
than differential geometry. Thus it is not only efficient and
robust, but also able to delineate the ridges and valleys (and
thus the slope units) more accurately as demonstrated by the
lower zonal standard deviation of aspect compared to a tradi-
tional method. In addition, unlike other morphometric param-
eters (e.g., curvature) that must be calculated multiple times at
multiple scales, Geomorphon can be calculated by specifying a
maximum search radius and, in a single scan, it can self-adapt
and find the landform types at optimal local scales (Jasiewicz
and Stepinski 2013). Theoretically, choosing an infinitely large
search radius should result in the identification of landform
elements at all scales (Jasiewicz and Stepinski 2013). In practice,
geomorphon maps created with different maximum search radii
quickly converge (Jasiewicz and Stepinski 2013) as the maximum
60 computation. This unique property of self-adaptive scale of
50 geomorphon addresses one of the major challenges facing other
40 slope unit delineation methods. Another free parameter in the
30 geomorphon method is the flatness threshold, the minimum
20
angle to define whether a cell is above, same, or below another
10
cell. The results presented here were based the flatness thresh-
80 90 100
old of 1°. We tested a number of threshold values and found
that the valleys and ridges derived were not sensitive to this
parameter; the only differences were all in flat areas, which are
not our primary concern in slope unit mapping. Thus, using
geomorphon elements to build slope unit has several advan-
tages over other slope unit delineation method (e.g., Alvioli
et al. 2016). (1) It is simple and efficient. (2) It self-adapts to
find the optimal scale. (3) It only has two free parameters: the
maximum search radius and the flatness threshold angle. In
ð9Þ
practice, using a relatively large maximum search radius would
capture landform elements at suitable scales for LSM and the
result is not sensitive to the flatness threshold value. (4) Unlike
the method of Avioli et al. (2016), the geomorphon method for
generating slope unit is independent from any particular LSM,
which makes it a more generic framework for any LSM. In
addition, using slope units, as opposed to pixels, as the basic
LSM mapping units also makes it easier for government agen-
cies to implement measures to mitigate landslide hazard risk
because the slope units are directly related real world features.
The geographical detector method is based on spatial variance
analysis, makes virtually no assumptions about the data, and can
work with both continuous and categorical data (Wang et al. 2016;
Wang and Xu 2017). These properties makes it an ideal framework for
objectively selecting the most relevant contributing factors (which
include both continuous and categorical data) for LSM and assigning
proper weights to account for their different contribution to landslide.
Although in this study, we focused on demonstrating using PD values
to assign the weights to a set of pre-selected preparatory factors, which
is done partly for easy comparison with the previous study (Liu et al.
2016), the method can be applied to a large number of potential factors
and select the most relevant ones based on their PD values and their
statistical significance test.
The PD values from geographical detector offer an objective
assessment of the relative importance of the four selected fac-
tors in contributing to landslide in the study area and provide
the basis for objectively assigning weights to them. The weights
show that the most important contributing factor is slope angle

Table 2 Comparison of the two LSI models

Top x% highly susceptible area CPOLO ρ (%)
Old LSI (%) New LSI (%)
1% 6.8 11.1 62.4
2% 11.7 22.4 90.6
10% 42.1 49.3 16.9
20% 63.4 74.6 17.7
(CPOLO cumulative percentage of landslide occurrence, ρ percentage of improvement, see Eq. (9))

472 Landslides 15 & (2018)

(0.43), which is followed by total flux (0.31), lithology (0.16), and
aspect (0.10). These objectively determined weights may also
offer new insights into the process of the landslide mechanism
in the study area. Adopting this approach takes the subjectivity
out of the LSM and makes it a general framework applicable to
any area that has sufficient landslide inventory and potential
contributing factors data.
As with any other frequency ratio based LSM, our new LSM model
also assumes the landslide inventory data to be comprehensive
enough so that the frequency can be represented as an area ratio
(Liu et al. 2016). By incorporating the geomorphon method to map the
slope unit at the self-adjusted optimal scale and the geographical
detector method to objectively assign proper weights to different
factors, our new model performs better than the old one using
individual cells as basic mapping units and simple geometric mean,
and the improvement is particularly impressive in the highly suscep-
tible areas, where most of the damage to properties and loss of lives
occur. Our new model offers a general framework to map suitable
slope units, select relevant factors, and assign their weights, and thus
make better LSM to mitigate the negative impacts of landslide hazard.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their
constructive reviews of earlier versions of the paper. This research
is supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology of the
Republic of China, (Taiwan), under Contract No. MoST 106-2611-
M-006-001 and the Soil and Water Conservation Bureau under
Contract No. 106AS-7.3.1-SB-S2.
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W. Luo ())
Department of Geography,
Northern Illinois University,
DeKalb, IL, USA
e-mail: wluo@niu.edu
C. Liu
Global Earth Observation and Data Analysis Center, Department of Earth Sciences,
National Cheng-Kung University,
Tainan, Taiwan