Landslide Inventory Mapping in the Fourteen Northern Provinces of Vietnam: Achievements and Difficulties

Abstract

The State-Funded Landslide Project (SFLP) is a national program to systematically assess landslide susceptibility, hazard and risk for all of prone areas in Vietnam. Under this SFLP, in the first phase of SFLP (2012SFLP ( -2014, activities of landslide inventory mapping were implemented over the fourteen Northern mountainous provinces. As the achievements, 10,149 historic landslides were mapped by field surveys and 9405 locations with landslide signs were interpreted from air-photos and analysis of 3D relief. Approximately 83% of the surveyed landslides locate in accessible areas, with small and medium dimensions and partly as a result of the slope cuts. About 76% of the interpreted landslides locate in inaccessible areas, and only 24% of the interpreted locate in accessible areas, of which 65% were found active landslides at the time of surveying, naturally occurred with large dimensions. However, the inventory exposes some major drawbacks: (1) The unavailability of multi-date air-photos; (2) The lack of human resources with enough experiences in image interpretation; (3) The difficulties of verifying the interpreted landslides, especially for the inaccessible sites; (4) Few or no sources of historic information due to the isolated sites or little memory of small or medium size events; (5) No updates developed by the surveyors after they finished their tasks. Those drawbacks can lead to the insufficiency of adequate data on the types, sizes and characteristics of the slope failures, especially the exact dates of occurrences. Despite of those difficulties, the achieved inventory database have been updated and then used as basic input for the susceptibility and hazard mapping as well as preliminary results of SFLP to inform the local authorities and communities about real situations of landslides in their areas.

Enhancing Prediction Performance of Landslide Susceptibility Model Using Hybrid Machine Learning Approach of Bagging Ensemble and Logistic Model Tree

“…Landslide inventory map for the URRB was constructed from two main sources: (i) historic landslides from the project VAST05.02/14-15 in 2015, which was prepared by Tien Bui et al [40]; and, (ii) landslide polygons from the State-Funded Landslide Project (SFLP) 2016 [9], a national landslide…”

“…Landslide inventory map for the URRB was constructed from two main sources: (i) historic landslides from the project VAST05.02/14-15 in 2015, which was prepared by Tien Bui et al [40]; and, (ii) landslide polygons from the State-Funded Landslide Project (SFLP) 2016 [9], a national landslide program that is carrying out in Vietnam. The SFLP project has systematically investigated and collected historic landslides for all northwest mountainous provinces in Vietnam, including the study area.…”

“…Accordingly, these landslides were mainly interpreted and mapped using aerial photos and field investigations. Detailed descriptions of methods and techniques for obtaining these historic landslides in the SFLP project are present in [9].…”

“…Accordingly, these landslides were mainly interpreted and mapped using aerial photos and field investigations. Detailed descriptions of methods and techniques for obtaining these historic landslides in the SFLP project are present in [9]. As result, a total of 255 historic soil-mixed-boulder slides that occurred during the last two decades were registered for the landslide inventory map (Figure 1).…”

“…The problem of rainfall-induced landslides, which are triggered by high intense and long lasting precipitation, seems to be more serious in recent years in many regions around the world due to the effects of climate changes i.e., extreme rainfall events [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]. The rainfall-triggered landslide is especially exacerbated in countries that are located in storm centers of the world, such as Vietnam [9], Philippines [10], and China [11]. For example, the tropical typhoon of Rasmussen caused various floods and landslides with the total damages were estimated at $7 billion [12].…”