Analyzing and predicting of land slide prone areas using remote sensing and GIS techniques.

Abstract

Landslide is the major natural disaster in hill country of Sri Lanka. There are ample examples for losses from landslides to human lives, agriculture, economic properties and transportation. Therefore, identification of landslide prone areas plays an important role in avoiding or minimizing the hazards. Among the factors affecting landslides, land use is the foremost controllable and highly floating factor over time. Obtaining land use data using manual techniques is very tricky in slope areas. Therefore the importance of using remote sensing techniques is emerged. This study leads to identification and prediction of landslide prone areas with the variance of land use using geospatial techniques. This research is based on the data collected from Elapatha, Ratnapura district, Sri Lanka. Field data and remotely sensed data such as satellite images, survey data and GPS data are collected and subsequently analyzed using remote sensing and GIS software. In this work, a methodology has been developed to generate a landslide susceptibility potential map of the selected area considering the factors which are causing landslides in Sri Lanka by using remote sensing and GIS techniques.