Temporal and spatial distributions of landslides in the Qinba Mountains, Shaanxi Province, China

Abstract

The spatial and temporal distributions of landslides can be used to assess the potential future impacts of landslides over large scales. However, quantitatively characterizing the spatial and temporal distributions of landslides and their causes remains a critical challenge. In this work, a typical landslide-prone region (the Qinba Mountains) is selected to identify this spatial and temporal trend. Information on 295 landslides spanning ten years from 2005 to 2014 was collected. The results revealed that landslide occurrences were clustered in time and space. Approximately 81% of the total landslides occurred from July to October. Moreover, a power law relationship between the cumulative frequency and number of landslides per day was discovered. Notably, the probability density of the time interval decreased as the time interval between landslide events increased, and this relationship was well described by a negative power-law correlation. Furthermore, the spatial and temporal distribution pattern of most landslides were influenced by rainfall events and earthquakes. There were several clustered centers in the study area, and the mean centers of the landslide distribution varied among years.

Landslide Scaling: A Review

“…Qiu et al () studied 295 historical landslides (2005–2014) in a 74,000‐km 2 region of the Qinba Mountains, China. Qiu et al () found the cumulative frequency distribution of the number of landslides occurring per day followed a power function distribution with a scaling exponent of −1.18 (with number of landslides per day ranging from 1 to 100). Most days in the time series had zero landslides; this value was not included in the scaling analysis.…”

“…Spatial patterns of landslide locations have been found to exhibit power scaling properties (Goltz, 1996;Guthrie & Evans, 2004b;Liucci et al, 2015;Qiu et al, 2019). Guthrie and Evans (2004b) and Qiu et al (2019), using nearest neighbor analysis and density contour methods, found that the spatial distribution of landslides cluster and that intraday rainfall magnitudes and earthquake occurrences correlate with the clustering of landslides within the study areas.…”

“…For disks with larger base diameters of 3 inches, avalanches occurred without falling off the pile, and the frequency size distribution for events where sand left the system did not follow a power function. Puhl (1992) also studied the behavior of granular sand, sieved to be a nearly uniform size, and found that by adding grains to the center of a surface of finite area, and only considering events that do not reach the side of the raised surface (which occur as the pile is growing upward and outward without events spilling over the edge), power function scaling of event sizes was observed and it was concluded that the process was exhibiting SOC behavior. SOC behavior was not observed for avalanches that overflowed the edges of the raised surface.…”

“…Landslides and rock falls have been found to have size-frequency distributions that follow a power function for both area and volume of large events (Brardinoni & Church, 2004;Brunetti et al, 2009;Catani et al, 2005;Chien-Yuan et al, 2007;Crosta et al, 2003;Fujii, 1969;Guthrie & Evans, 2004a, 2004bGuzzetti et al, 2002Guzzetti et al, , 2005Havenith et al, 2006;Hovius et al, 1997Hovius et al, , 2000Iwahashi et al, 2003;Korup, 2005;Malamud & Turcotte, 1999;Martin et al, 2002;Massey et al, 2018;Pelletier et al, 1997;Stark & Hovius, 2001;Zhang et al, 2019). Landslides have also been found to exhibit spatial (e.g., Goltz, 1996;Guthrie & Evans, 2004b;Liucci et al, 2015;Qiu et al, 2019), geometric (e.g., Larsen et al, 2010), and temporal (e.g., Qiu et al, 2019) scaling or clustering. The above referenced landslide studies have been conducted in different locations and are associated with different triggering mechanisms including earthquakes, precipitation, and snow melt.…”

Temporal Probability Assessment and Its Use in Landslide Susceptibility Mapping for Eastern Bhutan

“…Landslide hazard may be defined as the probability of a damaging landslide in a spatial ("where") and temporal ("when") context, along with the magnitude ("how large") of the event [6,7]. Landslide susceptibility is defined as the likelihood of landslide occurrence ("where") in an area depending on local terrain conditions [8].…”