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Floods are both complex and destructive, and in most parts of the world cause injury, death, loss of agricultural land, and social disruption. Flood susceptibility (FS) maps are used by land‐use managers and land owners to identify areas that are at risk from flooding and to plan accordingly. This study uses machine learning ensembles to produce objective and reliable FS maps for the Haraz watershed in northern Iran. Specifically, we test the ability of the support vector regression (SVR), together with linear kernel (LK), base classifier (BC), and hyper‐parameter optimization (HPO), to identify flood‐prone areas in this watershed. We prepared a map of 201 past floods to predict future floods. Of the 201 flood events, 151 (75%) were used for modeling and 50 (25%) were used for validation. Based on the relevant literature and our field survey of the study area, 10 effective factors were selected and prepared for flood zoning. The results show that three of the 10 factors are most important for predicting flood‐sensitive areas, specifically and in order of importance, slope, distance to the river and river. Additionally, the SVR‐HPO model, with area under the curve values of 0.986 and 0.951 for the training and testing phases, outperformed the other two tested models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dust storm in Iran's western regions has been one of its major environmental problems in recent years, which has not only turned into a yearly phenomenon but is also expanding. This study investigated two events of dominant dust in southwestern Iran using moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometer imagery, Reanalysis Datasets (meteorological fields and atmospheric compositions), in both hot (July 2, 2008) and cold (February 18, 2017) seasons. After radiometric correction and calculation of brightness temperature as well as the reflective and thermal behavior of dust, the research results showed that the detection of dominant dust entering was 0.645 μm (visible red) and 0.858 μm (near-infrared) in the reflective ranges and 3.959, 8.55, 11.03, and 12.02 µm in the thermal ranges. Synoptically, the lower values for mean sea level pressure from the east Mediterranean along Syria and Iraq to the southwest and Central Asia facilitate a convergence condition in the lower troposphere that induces strong northwesterlies, Shamal winds, over the Middle East toward the Persian Gulf, forming a more expansive aerosol hotspot over southwest Iran. However, on a cold day, high dust events in Arabia and south Iran are related to the ongoing high pressure, which is accompanied by a subtropical jet, following anticyclonic circulation toward southwestern Iran. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Landslides are a dangerous natural hazard that can critically harm road infrastructure in mountainous places, resulting in significant damage and fatalities. The primary purpose of this study was to assess the efficacy of three machine learning algorithms (MLAs) for landslide susceptibility mapping including random forest (RF), decision tree (DT), and support vector machine (SVM). We selected a case study region that is frequently affected by landslides, the important Kamyaran–Sarvabad road in the Kurdistan province of Iran. Altogether, 14 landslide evaluation factors were input into the MLAs including slope, aspect, elevation, river density, distance to river, distance to fault, fault density, distance to road, road density, land use, slope curvature, lithology, stream power index (SPI), and topographic wetness index (TWI). We identified 64 locations of landslides by field survey of which 70% were randomly employed for building and training the three MLAs while the remaining locations were used for validation. The area under the receiver operating characteristics (AUC) reached a value of 0.94 for the decision tree compared to 0.82 for the random forest, and 0.75 for support vector machines model. Thus, the decision tree model was most accurate in identifying the areas at risk for future landslides. The obtained results may inform geoscientists and those in decision-making roles for landslide management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Water productivity (WP) is one of the most important critical indicators in the essential planning of water consumption in the agricultural sector. For this purpose, the WP and economic water productivity (WPe) were estimated using agronomic technologies. The impact of agronomic technologies on WP and WPe was carried out in two parts of field monitoring and modeling using novel intelligent approaches. Extreme learning machine (ELM), adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS), and artificial neural network (ANN) methods were used to model WP and WPe. A dataset including 200 field data was collected from five treatment and control sections in the Malekan region, located in the southeast of Lake Urmia, Iran, for the crop year 2020–2021. Six different input combinations were introduced to estimate WP and WPe. The models used were evaluated using mean squared error (RMSE), relative mean squared error (RRMSE), and efficiency measures (NSE). Field monitoring results showed that in the treatment fields, with the application of agronomic technologies, the crop yield, WP, and WPe increased by 17.9%, 30.1%, and 19.9%, respectively. The results explained that irrigation water in farms W1, W2, W3, W4, and W5 decreased by 23.9%, 21.3%, 29.5%, 16.5%, and 2.7%, respectively. The modeling results indicated that the ANFIS model with values of RMSE = 0.016, RRMSE = 0.018, and NSE = 0.960 performed better in estimating WP and WPe than ANN and ELM models. The results confirmed that the crop variety, fertilizer, and irrigation plot dimensions are the most critical influencing parameters in improving WP and WPe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Floods are one of the most destructive natural disasters causing financial damages and casualties every year worldwide. Recently, the combination of data‐driven techniques with remote sensing (RS) and geographical information systems (GIS) has been widely used by researchers for flood susceptibility mapping. This study presents a novel hybrid model combining the multilayer perceptron (MLP) and autoencoder models to produce the susceptibility maps for two study areas located in Iran and India. For two cases, nine, and twelve factors were considered as the predictor variables for flood susceptibility mapping, respectively. The prediction capability of the proposed hybrid model was compared with that of the traditional MLP model through the area under the receiver operating characteristic (AUROC) criterion. The AUROC curve for the MLP and autoencoder‐MLP models were, respectively, 75 and 90, 74 and 93% in the training phase and 60 and 91, 81 and 97% in the testing phase, for Iran and India cases, respectively. The results suggested that the hybrid autoencoder‐MLP model outperformed the MLP model and, therefore, can be used as a powerful model in other studies for flood susceptibility mapping. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Flooding is one of the most damaging natural hazards globally. During the past three years, floods have claimed hundreds of lives and millions of dollars of damage in Iran. In this study, we detected flood locations and mapped areas susceptible to floods using time series satellite data analysis as well as a new model of bagging ensemble-based alternating decision trees, namely, bag-ADTree. We used Sentinel-1 data for flood detection and time series analysis. We employed twelve conditioning parameters of elevation, normalized difference's vegetation index, slope, topographic wetness index, aspect, curvature, stream power index, lithology, drainage density, proximities to river, soil type, and rainfall for mapping areas susceptible to floods. ADTree and bag-ADTree models were used for flood susceptibility mapping. We used software of Sentinel application platform, Waikato Environment for Knowledge Analysis, ArcGIS, and Statistical Package for the Social Sciences for preprocessing, processing, and postprocessing of the data. We extracted 199 locations as flooded areas, which were tested using a global positioning system to ensure that flooded areas were detected correctly. Root mean square error, accuracy, and the area under the ROC curve were used to validate the models. Findings showed that root mean square error was 0.31 and 0.3 for ADTree and bag-ADTree techniques, respectively. More findings illustrated that accuracy was obtained as 86.61 for bag-ADTree model, while it was 85.44 for ADTree method. Based on AUC, success and prediction rates were 0.736 and 0.786 for bag-ADTree algorithm, in order, while these proportions were 0.714 and 0.784 for ADTree. This study can be a good source of information for crisis management in the study area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The anthropogenic impacts of development and frequent droughts have limited Iran's water availability. This has major implications for Iran's agricultural sector which is responsible for about 90% of water consumption at the national scale. This study investigates if declining water availability impacted agriculture in Iran. Using the Mann‐Kendall and Sen's slope estimator methods, we explored the changes in Iran's agricultural production and area during the 1981–2013 period. Despite decreasing water availability during this period, irrigated agricultural production and area continuously increased. This unsustainable agricultural development, which would have been impossible without the overabstraction of surface and ground water resources, has major long‐term water, food, environmental, and human security implications for Iran. Plain Language Summary: Given the heavy reliance of the agricultural sector on water availability, it is important to examine if Iran's agriculture has been impacted by water availability changes in recent decades. The investigation of the long‐term impacts of natural water availability changes on agricultural activities in the country during the 1981–2013 period revealed that the agricultural sector in Iran continued to expand regardless of decreasing water availability in the country. This expansion was facilitated by the excessive use of nonrenewable water resources which has significant environmental and socioeconomic implications. Key Points: Trends in Iran's agricultural production and area did not follow natural water availability changes due to meteorological variabilityIran's agricultural production continuously increased despite water availability reduction during 1981–2013The unsustainable growth of Iran's agriculture has important water, food, environmental, economic, and human security implications [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to apply and compare the performance of the three machine learning algorithms–support vector machine (SVM), bayesian logistic regression (BLR), and alternating decision tree (ADTree)–to map landslide susceptibility along the mountainous road of the Salavat Abad saddle, Kurdistan province, Iran. We identified 66 shallow landslide locations, based on field surveys, by recording the locations of the landslides by a global position System (GPS), Google Earth imagery and black-and-white aerial photographs (scale 1: 20,000) and 19 landslide conditioning factors, then tested these factors using the information gain ratio (IGR) technique. We checked the validity of the models using statistical metrics, including sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, kappa, root mean square error (RMSE), and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC). We found that, although all three machine learning algorithms yielded excellent performance, the SVM algorithm (AUC = 0.984) slightly outperformed the BLR (AUC = 0.980), and ADTree (AUC = 0.977) algorithms. We observed that not only all three algorithms are useful and effective tools for identifying shallow landslide-prone areas but also the BLR algorithm can be used such as the SVM algorithm as a soft computing benchmark algorithm to check the performance of the models in future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present research was carried out to study drought and its effects upon water resources using remote sensing data. To this end, the tropical rainfall measuring mission (TRMM) satellite precipitation, the synoptic stations, and fountain discharge data were employed. For monitoring of drought in the study area, in Kermanshah province, Iran, the monthly precipitation data of the synoptic stations along with TRMM satellite precipitation datasets were collected and processed in the geographic information system (GIS) environment. Statistical indicators were applied to evaluate the accuracy of TRMM precipitation against the meteorological stations' data. Standardized precipitation index, SPI, and normalized fountain discharge were used in the monitoring of drought conditions, and fountains discharge, respectively. The fountains were selected so that in addition to enjoying the most discharge rates, they spread along the study area. The evaluation of precipitation data showed that the TRMM precipitation data were of high accuracy. Studies in temporal scale are indicative of the strike of drought in this region to the effect that for most months of the year, frequency and duration in dry periods are much more than in wet periods. As for seasonal scales, apart from winter, the frequency and duration of drought in spring and autumn have been longer than in wet years. Moreover, the duration of these periods was different. A comparison between the results of changes in fountain discharges and drought index in the region has verified that the drought has caused a remarkable decline in the fountain discharges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marshes represent a unique ecosystem covering a large area of southern Iraq. In a major environmental disaster, the marshes of Iraq were drained, especially during the 1990s. Since then, droughts and the decrease in water imports from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers from Turkey and Iran have prevented them from regaining their former extent. The aim of this research is to extract the values of the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) for the period 1977–2017 from Landsat 2 MSS (multispectral scanner), Landsat 8 OLI (operational land imager) and Sentinel 2 MSI (multi-spectral imaging mission) satellite images and use supervised classification to quantify land and water cover change. The results from the two satellites (Landsat 2 and Landsat 8) are compared with Sentinel 2 to determine the best tool for detecting changes in land and water cover. We also assess the potential impacts of climate change through the study of the annual average maximum temperature and precipitation in different areas in the marshes for the period 1981–2016. The NDVI analysis and image classification showed the degradation of vegetation and water bodies in the marshes, as vast areas of natural vegetation and agricultural lands disappeared and were replaced with barren areas. The marshes were influenced by climatic change, including rising temperature and the diminishing amount of precipitation during 1981–2016. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We mapped landslide susceptibility in Kamyaran city of Kurdistan Province, Iran, using a robust deep-learning (DP) model based on a combination of extreme learning machine (ELM), deep belief network (DBN), back propagation (BP), and genetic algorithm (GA). A total of 118 landslide locations were recorded and divided in the training and testing datasets. We selected 25 conditioning factors, and of these, we specified the most important ones by an information gain ratio (IGR) technique. We assessed the performance of the DP model using statistical measures including sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, F1-measure, and area under-the-receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC). Three benchmark algorithms, i.e., support vector machine (SVM), REPTree, and NBTree, were used to check the applicability of the proposed model. The results by IGR concluded that of the 25 conditioning factors, only 16 factors were important for our modeling procedure, and of these, distance to road, road density, lithology and land use were the four most significant factors. Results based on the testing dataset revealed that the DP model had the highest accuracy (0.926) of the compared algorithms, followed by NBTree (0.917), REPTree (0.903), and SVM (0.894). The landslide susceptibility maps prepared from the DP model with AUC = 0.870 performed the best. We consider the DP model a suitable tool for landslide susceptibility mapping. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Solar radiation plays a pivotal role in the energy balance at the Earth's surface, evaporation, snow melting, water requirements of plants, and hydrological control of catchments. In this work, performance of ERA-Interim (a reanalysis dataset) was examined to estimate solar radiation at Ahvaz, BandarAbbas, and Kermanshah weather stations representing the even spatial distribution over Iran using eight empirical models and an artificial intelligence-based model (SVM: Support Vector Machine). In the calibration set, SVM exhibited the best performance with RMSEs of 249, 299 and 437 J.cm−2.day−1 at the aforementioned stations, respectively. In validation set, SVM reduced the errors in the estimates of solar radiation by 2.5 and 7.3 percent compared to the best empirical model at Ahvaz station (Abdallah model, RMSE = 242 J.cm−2.day−1) and Kermanshah station (Angstrom-Prescott model, RMSE = 315 J.cm−2.day−1), respectively. During the validation at BandarAbbas station, Bahel and Abdallah model (RMSE = 309 J.cm−2.day−1), Angstrom-Prescott model (RMSE = 310 J.cm−2.day−1) and SVM (RMSE = 312 J.cm−2.day−1) showed a relatively similar performance. The results also showed that the ERA-Interim dataset can be a comparatively suitable alternative to some of the empirical models, where radiation or the input parameters of empirical models are not directly measured, with RMSEs ​​of 382.81, 320.82 and 414.1 J.cm−2.day−1 at Ahvaz, BandarAbbas, and Kermanshah stations, respectively (in validation phase); although its error rates are significant compared with the SVM model, and substituting it for artificial intelligence-based models is not recommended. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital elevation model (DEM) plays a vital role in hydrological modelling and environmental studies. Many essential layers can be extracted from this land surface information, including slope, aspect, rivers, and curvature. Therefore, DEM quality and accuracy will affect the extracted features and the whole process of modeling. Despite freely available DEMs from various sources, many researchers generate this information for their areas from various observations. Sentinal-1 synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images are among the best Earth observations for DEM generation thanks to their availabilities, high-resolution, and C-band sensitivity to surface structure. This paper presents a comparative study, from a hydrological point of view, on the quality and reliability of the DEMs generated from Sentinel-1 data and DEMs from other sources such as AIRSAR, ALOS-PALSAR, TanDEM-X, and SRTM. To this end, pair of Sentinel-1 data were acquired and processed using the SAR interferometry technique to produce a DEM for two different study areas of a part of the Cameron Highlands, Pahang, Malaysia, a part of Sanandaj, Iran. Based on the estimated linear regression and standard errors, generating DEM from Sentinel-1 did not yield promising results. The river streams for all DEMs were extracted using geospatial analysis tool in a geographic information system (GIS) environment. The results indicated that because of the higher spatial resolution (compared to SRTM and TanDEM-X), more stream orders were delineated from AIRSAR and Sentinel-1 DEMs. Due to the shorter perpendicular baseline, the phase decorrelation in the created DEM resulted in a lot of noise. At the same time, results from ground control points (GCPs) showed that the created DEM from Sentinel-1 is not promising. Therefore, other DEMs' performance, such as 90-meters' TanDEM-X and 30-meters' SRTM, are better than Sentinel-1 DEM (with a better spatial resolution). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Zrebar Lake is one of the largest freshwater lakes in Iran and it plays an important role in the ecosystem of the environment, while its desiccation has a negative impact on the surrounded ecosystem. Despite this, this lake provides an interesting recreation setting in terms of ecotourism. The prediction and forecasting of the water level of the lake through simple but practical methods can provide a reliable tool for future lake water resource management. In the present study, we predict the daily water level of Zrebar Lake in Iran through well-known decision tree-based algorithms, including the M5 pruned (M5P), random forest (RF), random tree (RT) and reduced error pruning tree (REPT). We used five different water input combinations to find the most effective one. For our modeling, we chose 70% of the dataset for training (from 2011 to 2015) and 30% for model evaluation (from 2015 to 2017). We evaluated the models' performances using different quantitative (root mean square error (RMSE), mean absolute error (MAE), coefficient of determination (R2), percent bias (PBIAS) and ratio of the root mean square error to the standard deviation of measured data (RSR)) and visual frameworks (Taylor diagram and box plot). Our results showed that water level with a one-day lag time had the highest effect on the result and, by increasing the lag time, its effect on the result was decreased. This result indicated that all the developed models had a good prediction capability, but the M5P model outperformed the others, followed by RF and RT equally and then REPT. Our results showed that these algorithms can predict water level accurately only with a one-day lag time in water level as an input and they are cost-effective tools for future predictions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Groundwater is an important natural resource in arid and semi-arid environments, where discharge from karst springs is utilized as the principal water supply for human use. The occurrence of karst springs over large areas is often poorly documented, and interpolation strategies are often utilized to map the distribution and discharge potential of springs. This study develops a novel method to delineate karst spring zones on the basis of various hydrogeological factors. A case study of the Bojnourd Region, Iran, where spring discharge measurements are available for 359 sites, is used to demonstrate application of the new approach. Spatial mapping is achieved using ensemble modelling, which is based on certainty factors (CF) and logistic regression (LR). Maps of the CF and LR components of groundwater potential were generated individually, and then, combined to prepare an ensemble map of the study area. The accuracy (A) of the ensemble map was then assessed using area under the receiver operating characteristic curve. Results of this analysis show that LR (A = 78%) outperformed CF (A = 67%) in terms of the comparison between model predictions and known occurrences of karst springs (i.e., calibration data). However, combining the CF and LR results through ensemble modelling produced superior accuracy (A = 85%) in terms of spring potential mapping. By combining CF and LR statistical models through ensemble modelling, weaknesses in CF and LR methods are offset, and therefore, we recommend this ensemble approach for similar karst mapping projects. The methodology developed here offers an efficient method for assessing spring discharge and karst spring potentials over regional scales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Flash floods are one of the most devastating natural hazards; they occur within a catchment (region) where the response time of the drainage basin is short. Identification of probable flash flood locations and development of accurate flash flood susceptibility maps are important for proper flash flood management of a region. With this objective, we proposed and compared several novel hybrid computational approaches of machine learning methods for flash flood susceptibility mapping, namely AdaBoostM1 based Credal Decision Tree (ABM-CDT); Bagging based Credal Decision Tree (Bag-CDT); Dagging based Credal Decision Tree (Dag-CDT); MultiBoostAB based Credal Decision Tree (MBAB-CDT), and single Credal Decision Tree (CDT). These models were applied at a catchment of Markazi state in Iran. About 320 past flash flood events and nine flash flood influencing factors, namely distance from rivers, aspect, elevation, slope, rainfall, distance from faults, soil, land use, and lithology were considered and analyzed for the development of flash flood susceptibility maps. Correlation based feature selection method was used to validate and select the important factors for modeling of flash floods. Based on this feature selection analysis, only eight factors (distance from rivers, aspect, elevation, slope, rainfall, soil, land use, and lithology) were selected for the modeling, where distance to rivers is the most important factor for modeling of flash flood in this area. Performance of the models was validated and compared by using several robust metrics such as statistical measures and Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic (AUC) curve. The results of this study suggested that ABM-CDT (AUC = 0.957) has the best predictive capability in terms of accuracy, followed by Dag-CDT (AUC = 0.947), MBAB-CDT (AUC = 0.933), Bag-CDT (AUC = 0.932), and CDT (0.900), respectively. The proposed methods presented in this study would help in the development of accurate flash flood susceptible maps of watershed areas not only in Iran but also other parts of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mapping flood-prone areas is a key activity in flood disaster management. In this paper, we propose a new flood susceptibility mapping technique. We employ new ensemble models based on bagging as a meta-classifier and K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) coarse, cosine, cubic, and weighted base classifiers to spatially forecast flooding in the Haraz watershed in northern Iran. We identified flood-prone areas using data from Sentinel-1 sensor. We then selected 10 conditioning factors to spatially predict floods and assess their predictive power using the Relief Attribute Evaluation (RFAE) method. Model validation was performed using two statistical error indices and the area under the curve (AUC). Our results show that the Bagging–Cubic–KNN ensemble model outperformed other ensemble models. It decreased the overfitting and variance problems in the training dataset and enhanced the prediction accuracy of the Cubic–KNN model (AUC=0.660). We therefore recommend that the Bagging–Cubic–KNN model be more widely applied for the sustainable management of flood-prone areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Documenting habitats of rangeland plant species is required to properly manage rangelands and to understand ecosystem processes. A reliable rangeland species potential map can help managers and policy makers design a sustainable grazing system on rangelands. The aim of this study is to map the plant species in the Qurveh City rangelands, Kurdistan Province, Iran, using state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms, including Support Vector Machine (SVM), Artificial Neural Network (ANN), Naïve Bayes (NB), Bayes Net (BN) and Classification and Regression Tree (CART). A total of 185 rangeland species were used in the study, together with 20 conditioning factors, to build and validate models. The One-R feature section technique and multicollinearity test were used, respectively, to determine the most important factors and correlations between them. Model validation was performed using sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, F1-measure, Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC), Kappa, root mean square error (RMSE), and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC). Results showed that topographic wetness index (TWI), slope angle, elevation, soil phosphorus and soil potassium were the five most important factors to increase the rangeland plants habitat suitability. The Naïve Bayes algorithm (AUC = 0.782) had the highest performance and prediction accuracy and best consistency across the species in the investigated rangeland, followed by the SVM (AUC = 0.763), ANN (AUC = 0.762), CART (AUC = 0.627), and BN (AUC = 0.617) models. [Display omitted] • The habitats of important ecological rangeland plants were modeled and mapped. • Machine learning algorithms are robust tools in rangeland rehabilitation and management. • Topographic, phosphorus and potassium were the main factors to increase habitat suitability. • NB and CART had the highest and lowest prediction for studied species of investigated rangeland. • High potential rangeland habitats can help decision makers in better rangeland management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The declining water level in Lake Urmia has become a significant issue for Iranian policy and decision makers. This lake has been experiencing an abrupt decrease in water level and is at real risk of becoming a complete saline land. Because of its position, assessment of changes in the Lake Urmia is essential. This study aims to evaluate changes in the water level of Lake Urmia using the space-borne remote sensing and GIS techniques. Therefore, multispectral Landsat 7 ETM + images for the years 2000, 2010, and 2017 were acquired. In addition, precipitation and temperature data for 31 years between 1986 and 2017 were collected for further analysis. Results indicate that the increased temperature (by 19%), decreased rainfall of about 62%, and excessive damming in the Urmia Basin along with mismanagement of water resources are the key factors in the declining water level of Lake Urmia. Furthermore, the current research predicts the potential environmental crisis as the result of the lake shrinking and suggests a few possible alternatives. The insights provided by this study can be beneficial for environmentalists and related organizations working on this and similar topics., Competing Interests: No potential conflicts of interest were reported by the authors.

Shallow landslides damage buildings and other infrastructure, disrupt agriculture practices, and can cause social upheaval and loss of life. As a result, many scientists study the phenomenon, and some of them have focused on producing landslide susceptibility maps that can be used by land-use managers to reduce injury and damage. This paper contributes to this effort by comparing the power and effectiveness of five machine learning, benchmark algorithms-Logistic Model Tree, Logistic Regression, Naïve Bayes Tree, Artificial Neural Network, and Support Vector Machine-in creating a reliable shallow landslide susceptibility map for Bijar City in Kurdistan province, Iran. Twenty conditioning factors were applied to 111 shallow landslides and tested using the One-R attribute evaluation (ORAE) technique for modeling and validation processes. The performance of the models was assessed by statistical-based indexes including sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, mean absolute error (MAE), root mean square error (RMSE), and area under the receiver operatic characteristic curve (AUC). Results indicate that all the five machine learning models performed well for shallow landslide susceptibility assessment, but the Logistic Model Tree model (AUC = 0.932) had the highest goodness-of-fit and prediction accuracy, followed by the Logistic Regression (AUC = 0.932), Naïve Bayes Tree (AUC = 0.864), ANN (AUC = 0.860), and Support Vector Machine (AUC = 0.834) models. Therefore, we recommend the use of the Logistic Model Tree model in shallow landslide mapping programs in semi-arid regions to help decision makers, planners, land-use managers, and government agencies mitigate the hazard and risk.