Three (nearly) complete inventories of landslides triggered by the May 12, 2008 Wenchuan Mw 7.9 earthquake of China and their spatial distribution statistical analysis
Citation
Xu, C., Xu, X., Yao, X., et al. (2014). Three (nearly) complete inventories of landslides triggered by the May 12, 2008 Wenchuan Mw 7.9 earthquake of China and their spatial distribution statistical analysis. Landslides, 11: 441-461. Link to paper
Abstract
The May 12, 2008 Wenchuan earthquake of China (Mw 7.9 or Ms 8.0) triggered hundreds of thousands of landslides. Mapping such a large number of landslides is a major task, considering the large size of the affected area and the availability of pre- and post-earthquake remote sensing images. This paper compares three (nearly) complete landslide inventories that were compiled from visual image interpretation. The three inventories differ in the manner in which the landslides are represented, either as polygons, centroid points, or top points. Landslides in the three inventories use one-to-one correspondence. Each of the three inventories includes a large proportion of the 197,481 landslides triggered by the earthquake. These landslides were delineated as individual solid polygons and points using visual interpretation of high-resolution aerial photographs and satellite images acquired following the earthquake and verified by selected field checking throughout a broad area of approximately 110,000 km2. These landslides cover a total area of approximately 1,160 km2. Based on the inventories of landslide polygons and landslide centroid points, two types of density maps were constructed. Correlations of landslide occurrence with seismic, geologic, and topographic parameters were analyzed using the three landslide inventories. Statistical analysis of their spatial distribution was performed using both the landslide area percentage (LAP), defined as the percentage of the area affected by the landslides and the landslide number density (LND), defined as the number of landslides per square kilometer.