Landslide risk evaluation and its causative factors in typical mountain environment of China: a case study of Yunfu City

The urban area of Yunfu City is a typical mountain environment with the thin surface soil layer, broken terrain, and the fragile geological environment, which is a landslide hazard prone region, seriously threatening the safety of residents' lives and property. It is crucial to accurately reveal the landslide risk and its causative factors to develop regional geological disaster prediction and mitigation strategies. However, the risk assessment and cause analysis of landslides in Yunfu City are rarely studied at present. Therefore, this study selects 11 causative factors (elevation, slope, slope aspect, bedding structure, distance from fault, lithology, precipitation, distance from water, normalized vegetation index (NDVI), distance from road, and land use), and integrates the modified frequency ratio model and geographic detector method to analyze the spatial distribution pattern of landslide risk and its causative factors. The results indicate that the maximum predicted area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) and the average predicted AUC of the modified frequency ratio model perform best at the precision of 5, with the values of 0.83921 and 0.81872, respectively, which can accurately reveal the landslide risk evaluation in the study area. According to the experimental results, the landslide risk in the study area generally shows a trend of high in the north and low in the south. Besides, the overall risk of landslide hazards is low, with the area of very low grade and low grade accounting for 75.20% of the total area. Among the selected 11 potential factors, precipitation, NDVI, slope aspect, distance from water and slope are the main causative factors to induce landslide hazards. Furthermore, this study also describes in detail the combination of factors that are conducive to landslide hazards, which can provide a decision basis for relevant departments to carry out regional landslide hazards prevention and mitigation strategies, and can also provide a reference for geological hazard risk evaluation study in other mountain environment.