Frequency ratio and GIS-based evaluation of landslide susceptibility applied to cultural heritage assessment

This study aims to produce landslide susceptibility maps using frequency ratio (FR) model with the help of GIS to be used in cultural heritage (CH) mitigation and assessment for a catchment from northeastern Romania. In total, seven conditioning factors were used to assess the landslide susceptibility index (LSI): elevation, slope angle, curvature, normalised difference vegetation index (NDVI), roughness, distance to rivers and landforms. The landslide susceptibility maps were prepared with the help of GIS software and classified into four susceptibility areas: low, medium, high, and very high. The more conditioning factors were added to the susceptibility, the better validation results were obtained (from an AUC = 0.51 corresponding for five factors, to an AUC = 0.75 for the seven factors). The model validation has shown that the maps made using FR model has a success rate of 75.24%. The landslide susceptibility maps have a high accuracy and will be helpful not only for CH protection and preservation, also for land-use planning, hazard mitigation, and risk reduction. Out of the 47 CH sites, more than a half are located in areas with high and very high susceptibility to landslides.