Evaluation of landslide susceptibility based on VW-AHP-IV model: a case of Pengyang County, Ningxia, China

Landslide is one of the most common and severe geological disasters, which significantly endangers people's lives and properties. Therefore, adequate evaluation of landslide susceptibility is an important for disaster control and mitigation. We selected Pengyang County as the study area, and divided the indicators into different state levels by graded area ratio and landslide occurrence frequency distribution. Meanwhile, the levels of each indicator were assigned the unique scores according to the corresponding information values. Given that the issue of subjectivity in single AHP model significantly influence the model performance in landslide susceptibility prediction, a hybrid model, namely variable-weight based weighted information value (VW-AHP-IV) model, was applied in this paper for landslide susceptibility evaluation. The study area was classified into five classes by the natural breakpoint method: very high susceptibility area (8.26%), high susceptibility area (19.78%), medium susceptibility area (29.93%), low susceptibility area (31.57%) and very low susceptibility area (10.46%). In addition, this paper also discussed the influences of precipitation and human activities on landslide occurrence. According to the evaluation results and discussion, the study area was classified into three prevention and control areas: focus prevention and control area, sub-focus prevention and control area, and general prevention and control area. For each area, the corresponding prevention and control suggestions were proposed in order to reduce the occurrence of landslide disasters.