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Integrating physical and empirical landslide

susceptibility models using generalized
additive models. Geomorphology, 129(34):376-386
Article in Geomorphology April 2011
Impact Factor: 2.79 DOI: 10.1016/j.geomorph.2011.03.001

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Geomorphology 129 (2011) 376386

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Geomorphology
j o u r n a l h o m e p a g e : w w w. e l s ev i e r. c o m / l o c a t e / g e o m o r p h

Integrating physical and empirical landslide susceptibility models using generalized

additive models
Jason N. Goetz a,, Richard H. Guthrie b, Alexander Brenning a
a
b

University of Waterloo, Department of Geography and Environmental Management, 200 University Avenue West, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3G1
Hemmera, Suite 250 - 1380 Burrard Street, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada V6Z 2H3

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Article history:
Received 2 March 2010
Received in revised form 20 January 2011
Accepted 4 March 2011
Available online 10 March 2011
Keywords:
Landslide susceptibility modeling
Generalized additive model
Logistic regression
SHALSTAB
Factor of Safety
Digital terrain analysis

a b s t r a c t
Physically based models are commonly used as an integral step in landslide hazard assessment. Geomorphic
principles can be applied to a broad area, resulting in rst order assessment of landslide susceptibility. New
techniques are now available that may result in the increased accuracy of such models. We investigate the
possibility to enhance landslide susceptibility modeling by integrating two physically-based landslide models,
the Factor of Safety (FS) and the Shallow Stability model (SHALSTAB), with traditional empiricalstatistical
methods that utilize terrain attribute information derived from a digital elevation model and land use
characteristics related to forest harvesting. The model performance is measured by the area under the receiver
operating characteristic curve (AUROC) and sensitivity at 90% and 80% specicity both estimated by bootstrap
resampling. Our study examines 278 landslide initiation points in the Klanawa Watershed located on
Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada. We use a generalized additive model (GAM) and a logistic
regression model (GLM) combining physical landslide models, terrain attributes and land use data, and GAMs
and GLMs using only subsets of these variables. In this study, all empirical and combined physicalempirical
models outperform the physically-based models, with GAMs often performing signicantly better than GLMs.
The strongest predictive performance is achieved by the GAMs using terrain attributes in combination with
land use data. Variables representing physically-based models do not signicantly improve the empirical
models, but they may allow for a better physical interpretation of empirical models. Also, based on bootstrap
variable-selection frequencies, land use data, FS, slope and plan/prole curvature are relatively the most
important predictor variables.
2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction
Despite considerable advances in landslide hazard analysis and
risk management, landslides continue to present an acute threat to
lives and property in mountainous regions worldwide. It is estimated,
for example, that China, Japan and Nepal average over 150 deaths
annually from direct and indirect landslide hazards. Average annual
cumulative economic costs of landslides in Canada, the United States,
Japan and India are over four billion dollars (Sidle and Ochiai, 2006).
Changing climatic patterns, continuous deforestation in mountainous
regions and increased urbanization and development in landslide
susceptible regions have contributed to a global increase in landslide
activity and risk (Schuster, 1996). Improved landslide susceptibility
models and maps are required to reduce the impacts of landslides on
infrastructure and human populations.
It is our objective to improve landslide susceptibility models by
combining physically-based approaches with statistical and machine-

Corresponding author. Tel.: + 1 519 888 4567x35783; fax: + 1 519 746 0658.
E-mail address: jgoetz@uwaterloo.ca (J.N. Goetz).
0169-555X/$ see front matter 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.geomorph.2011.03.001

learning techniques, and to empirically compare these model types

using the bootstrap, a modern statistical resampling-based method
for bias-reduced error estimation. The proposed integrative approach
can be understood as a local calibration and empirical enhancement of
physically-based slope stability models, or as an extension of
traditional empirical models to include physically-based slope
stability indexes as new terrain attributes in modern statistical
models. The improvement of predictive performances by this
approach is not as obvious as it may seem, because the availability
of additional predictor variables may also lead to overtting to the
training sample, which would be detected by bootstrap error
estimation.
We investigate the predictive performance of generalized additive
models (GAMs; Hastie and Tibshirani, 1990) that combine the
SHALSTAB model (Montgomery and Dietrich, 1994) and the Factor
of Safety (FS) derived from an innite-slope model (as used in
SINMAP; Pack et al., 1998), with a comprehensive set of terrain
attributes that are commonly used in empirical susceptibility models
(Brenning, 2005) as well as land use variables. To our knowledge, one
recent study has explored the idea of using a physically-based model
in combination with an empirical (meteorological) predictor variable

J.N. Goetz et al. / Geomorphology 129 (2011) 376386

in an empiricalphysical model for landslide susceptibility, however

without assessing performance improvements in comparison with
purely empirical models (Chang and Chiang, 2009). The present study
systematically investigates improvements in model performance that
can be attributed to model integration and the use of exible
modeling techniques.
Landslide susceptibility is the predisposition of an area to failure
under the inuence of gravity. Specically it can be described as the
probability of spatial occurrence of slope failure given a range of
destabilizing factors (Glade et al., 2005;Guzzetti et al., 2006). Since
landsliding is linked to other geomorphological processes and landforms, many methods of susceptibility assessment are based on the
identication of causative factors (Guzzetti et al., 1999; Glade et al.,
2005). Stable and unstable slope conditions can be mapped out by
studying these factors.
Physically-based models utilize the physical properties that
control geomorphological processes spatially and/or temporally.
Empirically-based models generally function under the principle
that landslides are more likely to occur under similar ground
conditions to previous events. Thus, a range of environmental
attributes is typically examined to determine factors related to
landslide initiation (Sidle and Ochiai, 2006). Empirical models of
susceptibility do not usually take into account triggering factors, such
as earthquakes and precipitation. Instead, they rely on factors that
predispose locations to landslide failure (Dai et al., 2002; Sidle and
Ochiai, 2006).
Since many of the regions that are most highly susceptible to
landslides are in developing countries, it is important to develop
methods that are affordable and can perform well with little data
(Sidle and Ochiai, 2006). Even in mountain areas in developed
countries, there is often a lack of adequate geological information. The

377

proposed empiricalphysical modeling approach, which estimates

physical model parameters using an internal optimization, is
implemented in and exemplies the application of free open-source
Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and statistical software in
this context.

2. Study area
Our study area is located in the Klanawa River watershed on the
southwestern coast of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada
(Fig. 1). This site encompasses a total area of 610 km2 with 960 m of
relief. The lithology is composed of grano-dioritic rocks and calcalkaline volcanic rocks. Climate effects coupled with its rugged terrain
formed by Pleistocene glaciations makes the study area generally
prone to landsliding. The Klanawa River is located in a temperate
maritime climate with annual precipitation typically greater than
3000 mm (Guthrie et al., 2008). The forest cover is generally
comprised of western hemlock and western redcedar trees. There
have been extensive human activities in this area related to the forest
industry and clear-cutting practices. As of 2001 approximately 46% of
the study area has been logged (Guthrie et al., 2008). Landslides in
this area have been noticed to frequently occur in deforested areas,
which are commonly adjacent to logging roads. In general, landslides
occurring on Vancouver Island have been observed to occur in greater
spatial densities when adjacent to roads. In addition, there has been a
considerable increase in the number of landslides after three decades
of forestry activities (Guthrie, 2002).To exclude the low-lying valley
oor that is not susceptible to landsliding, we only consider terrain
above 150 m elevation, which is an area of 394 km2, in model
construction and assessment.

Fig. 1. Map of the study area with landslide initiation points.

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J.N. Goetz et al. / Geomorphology 129 (2011) 376386

Two hundred and eighty-seven initiation points were extracted

from a landslide inventory using historical medium-scale aerial
photographs dated from 1994 to 2003. The landslides in the sample
typically begin as shallow translational failures, break up and lose
cohesion down-slope, and ultimately behave as ows (Fig. 2).These
shallow landslides are triggered by heavy rainfall occurring on the
coast of British Columbia. The heavy precipitation increases pore
pressure along soilbedrock interfaces or within the soil prole at
interfaces of lower permeability (Guthrie and Evans, 2004).

assume for the roads to have inuence on landslides. The logging

areas are mapped from interpretation of Landsat 5 TM and Landsat
7 ETM+ for a time period of 1995 to 2002 to roughly coincide with the
dates of landslides occurring in our inventory (Fig. 3).
The univariate relationships of each terrain attribute to landslide
occurrence are examined by calculating individual area under the
receiver operating characteristic curve values (see below).

3. Materials and methods

Two decisions have to be made in assessing the performance of

landslide susceptibility models: (1) Which error measure should be
used and (2) how should this quantity be estimated (Brenning, 2005).
In this study, we use the area under the receiver operating
characteristic (ROC) curve (AUROC) to assess a model's general ability
to discriminate landslide and non-landslide locations, and its
sensitivity at a xed specicity of 90% and 80% as a performance
measure for landslide detection. These quantities are estimated using
the bootstrap, a non-parametric computational estimation technique
(Efron and Tibshirani, 1993).
The ROC curve of a soft classier plots all possible combinations of
sensitivities (percentage of correctly classied landslide points)
against the corresponding specicities (percentage of correctly
classied non-landslide points) that can be achieved with a given
classier. AUROC is therefore a measure of the ability to discriminate
the two classes that is independent of a specic decision threshold on
the model output. It is normally above 50% (random discrimination)
and not higher than 100% (perfect separation of the two classes).
Previous literature in landslide and hazard susceptibility modeling has
mentioned the value of applying ROC curves for model assessment
(Brenning, 2005; Beguera, 2006; Frattini et al., 2010). This method is
particularly useful for application to our study because we use a soft
classication approach for discriminating hazard susceptibility. Success and prediction rate curves (Chung and Fabbri, 2003) are related
to the ROC curve but depend on the spatial density of landslides. Other

3.1. Terrain analysis and exploratory data analysis

Terrain attributes are important components of quantitative
landslide analyses because they simplify complex geomorphological
relationships and serve as surrogates for surface processes and
geophysical site conditions (Pachauri and Pant, 1992; Guzzetti et al.,
1999; Gritzner et al., 2001). Montgomery and Dietrich (1994)
demonstrated how local surface topography could summarize
destabilizing factors such as subsurface ow convergence, increased
soil saturation, and shear strength reduction. This study relies on
seven terrain attributes from a digital elevation model (DEM)
provided by British Columbia Terrain Resources Information Management (TRIM) with 25-m grid resolution to estimate landslide
susceptibility. These attributes are local slope, catchment area,
catchment slope, elevation, prole and plan curvature, and a
topographic wetness index (TWI; Beven and Kirkby, 1979).The
province acquired the TRIM data in 1987.
Guthrie (2002) illustrated the inuence of forest-harvesting
activities to increase landslide densities. Thus, data on logged areas
and roads are included as further variables to explore in our empirical
susceptibility models. The road data is from the British Columbia
Digital Road Atlas (BCDRA). This variable is included in the model as
distance from roads up to 100-m, which is the maximum distance we

3.2. Model assessment

Fig. 2. Typical landslides on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. (A) Stereopair of landslides in a natural setting. Landslides usually begin as shallow translational failures and break
up, losing cohesion, as they move down-slope. (B) Landslides initiating from a concave slope into a gully system. (C) Landslides in a forested setting. (D) Landslide showing both the
distinct planar failure surface, and the complete disintegration of material downslope.

J.N. Goetz et al. / Geomorphology 129 (2011) 376386

379

Fig. 3. Map of forest-harvesting related land use. The logged areas represent a mosaic of forest cuts from the years 1995 to 2002.

performance measures, such as a confusion matrix, require a hard

classier or cut-off values representing different levels of susceptibility to evaluate model performance.
In practice, the area delineated as unsafe or unstable by a landslide
susceptibility model must be small in order to reect the typically low
density of landslides and not restrict land use more than necessary.
Such a focused prediction is only possible when a high specicity is
achieved. As a second performance measure, we therefore estimate
the sensitivity of each model at a high specicity level of at least 90%,
and at the 80% level.
In the landslide literature, such model performance measures are
often measured on the training set of the classication rule or on a
separate test area; the latter is often, not quite correctly, referred to as
cross-validation. Brenning (2005) emphasizes that the training-set
estimation is over-optimistic and therefore biased, and that the testset approach may suffer from population drift, or spatially varying
distributional properties, and he therefore proposes a spatial crossvalidation approach for situations where complete gridded landslide
inventories are used for training a model. In our study we use less
dense random point samples for training and testing (on average 1.5
training and test samples per square kilometer) and therefore use
non-spatial error estimation techniques.
In addition to the training-set estimation of AUROC and sensitivity,
we apply the bootstrap estimation technique for model evaluation.
The bootstrap draws independent samples (with replacement) from
the available data in order to simulate the underlying data-generating
distribution. This distribution is thus approximated by the data themselves without making any parametric distributional assumption. The
bootstrap is a computationally intensive resampling-based statistical
estimation technique. We use 100 independently drawn bootstrap
replications of training and test sets in order to estimate the AUROC
and sensitivity for 100 independently trained models. Training and
test samples are each generated by drawing, with replacement, 287

landslide initiation points and 287 non-landslide points from the

available inventory.
3.3. Physically-based models
Our analysis considers two physically-based model components,
the SHALSTAB model and the FS model of the innite-slope stability
model introduced in this section. Both models and derived approaches
such as SINMAP are widely applied to landslide susceptibility mapping (Tarolli and Tarboton, 2006; Meisina and Scarabelli, 2007; Gomes
et al., 2008).
SHALSTAB combines an innite slope stability model and a
hydrological model to predict the steady-state rainfall that can
cause slope failure related to shallow landslides (Montgomery and
Dietrich, 1994; Guimares et al., 2003). The model assumes that local
surface topography is the dominant control of landslide occurrence
(Montgomery and Dietrich, 1994), which makes it appealing for DEMbased landslide analyses and clearly calls for a quantitative comparison with empirical models. SHALSTAB distinguishes between three
slope stability classes: unconditionally stable, conditionally stable,
and unconditionally unstable. Conditionally stable locations can be
characterized by their critical ratio of steady-state rainfall to soil
transmissivity (Q/T; compare, e.g., Montgomery and Dietrich, 1994;
Guimares et al., 2003),

Q=T = r



1
tan
sin 1
a
tan

where Q represents a given steady-state rainfall (m s1), T is the soil

transmissivity (m2 h1), a is the specic catchment area (m), which is
the catchment area (m2) divided by the contour length or width of a
grid cell (m), is the local slope (), is the friction angle () dening
instability, and r is the ratio of the saturated bulk density of soil to the

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J.N. Goetz et al. / Geomorphology 129 (2011) 376386

density of water (s/w). Essentially, the lower the Q/T value, the more
susceptible to landsliding a location is.
Unconditionally unstable slopes are dened as the slope gradient
being equal to or greater than the friction angle:
tan tan

Unconditionally stable areas are dened as locations that are

stable when saturated. Hence, as soil conditions become saturated,
the friction angle causing landslide failure decreases:
tan b tan11 = r

Due to a lack of knowledge of critical slope angles () and

saturated bulk density (r) for many landslide prone areas, we estimate
optimal and r values for our study area from the training data set.
We perform a complete grid search of and r values based on a
discretization of both variables.
An AUROC criterion on the training data set is used to evaluate the
model performance and to identify the optimal and r values that
maximize this performance measure. Specically a modied AUROC
(mAUROC) is applied, which uses the minimal path curve in the sense
of Zweig and Campbell (1993) to represent tied data, instead of the
usual straight diagonal path which was adopted for calculating our
AUROC values. The mAUROC penalizes for extreme parameter
combinations that would produce strongly tied data and this helps
with the convergence of the optimization within a physically meaningful domain.
We examine a range of twenty values from 25 to 45 and the
same number of r values from 1 to 3. The bootstrap distribution of
parameter estimates of and r obtained on each bootstrap sample
provides an assessment of parameter uncertainty. We apply the
SHALSTAB model to a study area that is inuenced by soil cohesion as
shown by the vegetation cover in Fig. 2. SHALSTAB can be applied to
areas where cohesion is an important factor by increasing the friction
angle appropriately, although this does not fully capture the effects of
cohesion (Montgomery and Dietrich, 1994).In our case, the optimized version of SHALSTAB will compensate the effect of cohesion in
the friction angle. Thus, the empirically optimal friction angle can be
expected to be greater than the actual one.
The innite slope model of FS is another common method for
quantifying the susceptibility of landslide occurrence. It can be
expressed as the ratio of stabilizing forces (cohesion and restoring
components of friction) to destabilizing forces (components of
gravity) on a failure plane parallel to the ground surface (Meisina
and Scarabelli, 2007). The formula of FS used in this study is given by
FS =

a
C + cos1 min TR sin
; 1 = r tan
sin

where C is dimensionless cohesion, R (m h1) is steady state recharge

and T (m2 h1) is soil transmissivity. The measure (T/R)sin can be
considered as the length (m) of a planar hillslope required to reach
saturation; we use the ratio of T/R (m) to represent R and T as a single
parameter in the FS model (Pack et al., 1998; Meisina and Scarabelli,
2007).
We consider FS as a function of C, , T/R, and r, and use a similar
method to numerically optimize these unknown parameters as in the
SHALSTAB model. Initial attempts to simultaneously optimize all four
parameters did not result in physically meaningful estimates of or r.
We therefore decided to plug SHALSTAB's more reasonable estimates
of and r into FS to reduce the dimension of the optimization space.
We also assume cohesionless ground conditions (C = 0); this worstcase scenario is widely used in the literature (Meisina and Scarabelli,
2007) and was the consistent result of initial modeling attempts with
only very little inuence of C on mAUROC. Therefore, only a one-

dimensional optimization of the remaining T/R parameter is required

for FS. We examine a logarithmic-scale discretization of T/R values
from 50 to 500 m; the T/R value that maximizes the mAUROC on
the training set is deemed to be optimal. In model assessment,
independent optimizations are carried out on each bootstrap training
sample.
3.4. Generalized additive model (GAM)
We use the generalized additive model (GAM) and the generalized
linear model (GLM) for empirical and combined empiricalphysical
modeling of landslide susceptibility. The GAM is a semi-parametric
extension of the GLM (or logistic regression in the case of a binary
response variable) that combines linear and nonlinear relationships
between predictor and response variables (Hastie and Tibshirani, 1990).
Nonlinear terms utilize smoothers to transform predictor variables. The
most widely used statistical approach for landslide susceptibility
mapping is the GLM (Ayalew and Yamagishi, 2005; Brenning, 2005).
The GAM has only recently been applied to landslide susceptibility
(Brenning, 2008; Jia et al., 2008; Park and Chi, 2008) and geomorphological distribution modeling in complex terrain (Brenning et al., 2007;
Brenning, 2009), showing stronger predictive performance than the
more widely used GLM (Park and Chi, 2008; Brenning, 2009).
We use the GAM and GLM with a combined backward-andforward stepwise variable selection based on the Akaike Information
Criterion (AIC), a measure of goodness-of-t that penalizes for model
complexity, starting from the null model. Each variable in a GAM can
be entered as linear (untransformed), nonlinear (transformed by
smoothing splines of two equivalent degrees of freedom), or not
included in the model. In this study the following GAM and GLM
models for predicting landslides are explored; empirical models using
only the above-mentioned seven terrain attributes as explanatory
variables (referred to as T-GAM and T-GLM); combined empirical
physical models using the (log-transformed) outputs of the SHALSTAB
(log(Q/T)) model and FS of the innite-slope model (log FS) described
above (PT-GAM and PT-GLM); empirical models using land use data,
logged areas and distance from road, and terrain attributes (LT-GAM
and LT-GLM); and combined empiricalphysical models using land
use data (LPT-GAM and LPT-GLM).We furthermore assess the relative
importance of each predictor variable in empirical and combined
models by determining their variable selection frequencies in GAMs
and GLMs built on bootstrap training samples.
3.5. Geocomputing software
Statistical geocomputing, the practical statistical analysis of geodata,
has strongly benetted in recent years from an increasing trend towards
an integration of statistical data analysis, especially the open-source
statistical software R, with geographic information system (GIS) software (Bivand, 2000; Brenning, 2008). We use a tight coupling of SAGA
GIS, an open-source GIS with strong terrain analysis capabilities, with R
for our analysis (R version 2.8.1; R Development Core Team, 2008; SAGA
GIS 2.0.3; Conrad, 2006; Brenning, 2008), and apply the implementation
of the GAM in the R package gam.
4. Results
4.1. Physically-based model parameter optimization
In the SHALSTAB model, the median optimal parameters are
= 40.6 (bootstrap standard deviation 3.1) and r = 1.78 (std. dev.
0.17) based on 100 bootstrap replications. In the FS model, the median
optimal T/R value is 91.65 m (std. dev. 54 m). Figs. 4 and 5A illustrate
the parameter optimization of SHALSTAB and FS when applied to the
entire study area, respectively. In this particular situation, the twodimensional parameter optimization for SHALSTAB reaches a unique

J.N. Goetz et al. / Geomorphology 129 (2011) 376386

Fig. 4. Parameter optimization of r and in the SHALSTAB model using the entire study
area for illustration. The median optimal values, based on the 100 bootstrap replications
are = 40.6 (std. dev. 3.1) and r = 1.78 (std. dev. 0.17).

maximum at = 40.5 and r = 1.67. Small changes in (3

deviation from the optimum) and r have little inuence on the
mAUROC. The FS parameter optimization (using the plug-in estimates
of and r from SHALSTAB) peaks at T/R = 214 m.
4.2. Exploratory data analysis
Using AUROC to assess the discriminatory power of individual
variables outside a statistical model, the strongest predictors are log

Fig. 5. Parameter optimization of T/R using the entire study area for illustration. (A) An
illustration of the effects of a range of T/R values on model performance of FS and PT-GAM
at different cohesions. The optimal T/R value, based on the entire study area, is 214 m with
an FS performance of 73.6% AUROC. The median optimal T/R value, based on the 100
bootstrap replication, is 92 m with a median FS performance of 71.6% AUROC. (B) An
illustration of the effects of a range of T/R values on the correlations between slope and log
catchment area to log FS at different cohesions.

381

FS (with physical parameters determined by optimization on the

entire study area) and slope (AUROC N 70%), followed by SHALSTAB's
log(Q/T), catchment slope, elevation, TWI, and distance to road
(AUROC N 60%; Table 1). Although prole and plan curvature and the
catchment area are weakly related to landslide occurrence
(AUROC b 60%), they may be still important in multiple-variable
models. For logging as a binary variable, the odds of landslide
occurrence are 3.5 times higher in logged areas than in deforested
areas, the odds being dened as the probability ratio of landslide
occurrence to non-occurrence in the respective area. All differences in
values of the predictor variables between landslide and non-landslide
points are statistically signicant at the 5% level based on Wilcoxon
rank sum tests (for continuous variables) and a2 test (for logged
areas),all nominal p-values being b 0.001.
Spearman's rank correlation coefcient (Sp) was used to examine
correlations between predictor variables. A strong inter-correlation
exists between log FS, slope and log(Q/T) ( Sp| N 0.82). Most notably,
log FS and slope have a very strong negative correlation for this
particular set of estimated parameters, although not in general for
different physical parameters that may result from the optimization
(Sp = 0.90; compare Fig. 5B). TWI and log catchment area share a
strong correlation (Sp = 0.85). Catchment slope has a moderate
correlation with log FS, log(Q/T) and slope (0.68 | Sp| 0.73). All
other correlations between variables are less strong with |Sp| b 0.50.
4.3. Predictive performance
The performance results of the bootstrap estimation show that all
empirical and combined models (AUROC between 73.7% and 80.8%)
outperform the physical models, FS (71.9%) and SHALSTAB (68.9%;
Table 2). The models containing land use data, LT-GAM and LPT-GAM
(AUROC = 80.8%) followed by LT-GLM and LPT-GLM (80.3%), are the
strongest at predicting landslide susceptibility. The performance of
the remaining models is lead by PT-GAM and T-GAM (74.9%),
followed by PT-GLM and T-GLM (73.7%). GAMs achieved only
marginal improvements in bootstrapped AUROC compared to the
corresponding GLMs, and only two of the four comparisons showed
statistically signicant differences (p-values b 0.001).Adding the land
use characteristics lead to larger performance improvements compared to adding terrain attributes to a model. Adding physically-based
variables had negligible effects on model performance.
An argument can be made that a good model is contingent on its
ability to detect landslide initiation points without classifying large
areas as unsafe, which leads to consider the bootstrap-estimated
sensitivity at 90% specicity as a more focused criterion than AUROC.
Differences between the models were more pronounced but also
more scattered in this situation compared to the comparison of AUROC
values. In particular, the GAMs performed consistently and signicantly 2.12.8% points more sensitive than the corresponding GLMs
using the same variables. The results for sensitivity at 80% specicity
are between ones for AUROC and the sensitivities at 90% specicity
and therefore lead to the same interpretations as these two criteria
(Table 2). For each of the performance measures, the KruskalWallis
rank sum test indicates an overall signicant difference in bootstrap
performance between the models. However, the Wilcoxon signed
rank sum tests did not always indicate statistically signicant
differences in the pairwise model comparisons (Fig. 6).
Landslide susceptibility maps using training data for the entire
study area were created for LPT-GAM, PT-GAM and FS and are shown
in Fig. 7. These three models represent the better-performing models
from within each model group (empirical with and without land use
variables, and physically-based models). Qualitatively, the empirical
models (LPT-GAM and PT-GAM) illustrated in Fig. 7 show more detail
in selection of very high landslide susceptibility than the physicallybased model (FS). The areas most susceptible to landslides in the FS
model tend to be generally associated with steep convergent hillslopes.

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J.N. Goetz et al. / Geomorphology 129 (2011) 376386

Table 1
Descriptive statistics of the morphometric and physical model predictor variables used for modeling landslide susceptibility.
Predictor variable

Non-landslide points:
Median (std. dev)

Landslide points:
Median (std. dev)

AUROC (%)
Study area

AUROC (%)
Bootstrap test set (std. dev)

log FSa
Slope (degrees)
log(Q/T)a
Catchment slope
Elevation (m)
Distance to road (m)
TWI
Plan curvature
Prole curvature
log catchment area

0.06
23.0
2.5
23.9
371
354
6.0
0.001
0.000
3.6

0.22
31.5
3.0
27.7
472
112
5.7
0.000
0.001
3.7

73.6
73.0
71.1
67.0
61.7
62.7
58.5
57.6
54.6
52.7

71.9
72.1
68.9
65.0
62.9
61.9
60.1
57.4
52.4
50.2

Logging (land use)

Logged
Forested

Non-landslide points (%)

16.4
83.6

(0.31)
(10.3)
(0.8)
(7.7)
(183)
(840)
(1.5)
(0.006)
(0.007)
(0.5)

(0.15)
(7.3)
(1.0)
(5.5)
(152)
(346)
(0.9)
(0.011)
(0.008)
(0.4)

(2.2)
(2.1)
(2.6)
(2.4)
(2.2)
(2.0)
(2.3)
(2.4)
(3.6)
(2.4)

Landslide points (%)

40.4
59.6

After parameter optimization of SHALSTAB and FS.

In contrast, the empirical models classify highly susceptibly areas based

on more specic slope angles, upwardly concave prole and convergent
plan curvature conditions. The inuence of incorporating deforested
areas for land use data in the LTP-GAM model can be observed in the
lower southwest corner of the map, which is an area of very high
landslide susceptibility that was not captured by the physically-based
models or the empirical models without land use data.

4.4. Variable importance and nonlinearity

In terms of their variable-selection frequencies in the GAMs, the
most important variables for the terrain-attribute-based models were
plan and prole curvature and slope variables, which were included in
more than 90 of the 100 bootstrap replications. The land use models
had a similar selection as the terrain-attribute-based models, however
with the addition of the variables for distance from road and logged
areas, which were selected in 100% of the bootstrap replications.
Nonlinear inuences of these variables were found very frequently
(44100% of the replications), based on the AIC criterion. Including
nonlinear versions of variables can inuence their relative importance. For example, slope in T-GAM is more frequent in the GAM
(99%), where it is in most cases nonlinearly smoothed (86%), than in
the GLM (90%).
For PT-GAM, the relative importance of terrain attributes is similar
to the terrain-based models, except from slope being selected only in
32% of the cases, certainly because of its very strong correlation with
log FS, which is selected in 98% of the bootstrap replications. Its most
important variables are plan and prole curvature and log FS. Linear
and nonlinear representations of log FS are nearly balanced, while

nonlinear representations are dominant in the case of the curvature

variables.
When the predictive models are built on the training set for
the study area, the PT-GAM includes four variables: log FS (linear),
log(Q/T) (linear), prole curvature (nonlinear) and plan curvature
(nonlinear). T-GAM and T-GLM include the same three variables:
slope, prole curvature and plan curvature; in T-GAM, all are nonlinearly transformed. The nonlinear variable transformations used in
PT-GAM and T-GAM are illustrated in Fig. 8. For comparison, the
SHALSTAB and FS models both incorporate two terrain attributes
(slope and specic catchment area) and two (FS: three, excluding
cohesion) additional parameters to be tuned.

5. Discussion
5.1. Model interpretation
Landslides are typically more prone to occur in steep convergent
areas (Montgomery and Dietrich, 1994). These curvature conditions
force soil water to converge at the soilbedrock contact or where the
soil meets an underlying impermeable layer (Wilson and Dietrich,
1987).After heavy rainstorms or long periods of rain, upwardly
concave slopes can hold more water for a longer period of time (Lee
and Min, 2001). A combination of antecedent rainfall conditions and
rainstorm or rapid snowmelt can result in an increase of pore water
pressure, which can lead to hillslopes becoming more susceptible to
failure (Talebi et al., 2008).
The empirical model results indicate that hillslopes with concave
prole and convergent plan curvature tend to have increased

Table 2
Model performance of GAM, GLM, and physically-based models (SHALSTAB and FS) estimated using the bootstrap and the training set (median value and standard deviation). The
median variable frequency represents the average number of variables included in each model for the bootstrap.
Model

LPT-GAM
LPT-GLM
LT-GAM
LT-GLM
PT-GAM
PT-GLM
T-GAM
T-GLM
FS
SHALSTAB

Bootstrap

Study area

AUROC
(%)

Sensitivity (%) at
90% specicity

Sensitivity (%) at
80% specicity

Mean variable
frequency

AUROC
(%)

Sensitivity (%) at
90% specicity

Sensitivity (%) at
80% specicity

80.8
80.3
80.8
80.3
74.9
73.7
74.9
73.7
71.9
68.9

47.7
45.6
48.4
46.2
31.6
29.1
31.0
28.2
19.5
19.0

63.4
62.7
63.8
62.4
48.3
45.6
47.7
46.7
41.8
38.1

6.1
6.0
5.9
5.8
4.3
4.4
3.9
4.1

83.4
83.3
83.8
83.2
77.7
77.1
77.4
76.6
73.6
71.1

56.4
54.4
56.4
56.8
35.8
35.8
36.7
34.5
24.0
24.4

69.7
69.7
70.4
67.2
54.4
51.2
54.0
51.2
47.0
42.2

(2.0)
(2.1)
(2.0)
(2.0)
(2.2)
(2.2)
(2.2)
(2.2)
(2.2)
(2.6)

(5.4)
(5.8)
(5.4)
(5.7)
(5.4)
(5.5)
(5.0)
(5.4)
(5.0)
(10.7)

(4.6)
(5.1)
(4.5)
(5.0)
(5.4)
(5.1)
(5.5)
(5.3)
(6.7)
(6.9)

(0.9)
(0.9)
(1.0)
(1.1)
(1.0)
(1.1)
(1.1)
(1.2)

J.N. Goetz et al. / Geomorphology 129 (2011) 376386

383

Fig. 6. Diagram of model performance and signicance. The performance of each empirical model has been mapped in a diagram where the arrow points to a model that had a lesser
performance; a solid line indicates that there is no difference, statistical or otherwise, between model performance. The numbers adjacent to the arrows indicate the percent
difference in performance between comparing models. Additionally, the statistical signicance of model differences are indicated using signicance codes following the percent
difference.

landslide susceptibility (Fig. 8). The terrain attributes for curvature

are interpreted as representing the topographic inuence of local
morphology on slope hydrology (Lee and Min, 2001) and soil erosion

or deposition. Prole curvature characterizes the subsurface acceleration or deceleration of ow down a slope, which in turn is related
to potential erosion or deposition rates and consequently spatially

Fig. 7. Landslide susceptibility maps for physically-based (FS),and combined models (LPT-GAM and PT-GAM) applied to the subarea shown in Fig. 1. The models are trained on the
entire study area. The area designated as Not applicable is a portion of the study area below the models' 150 m threshold.

384

J.N. Goetz et al. / Geomorphology 129 (2011) 376386

Fig. 8. Transformation of predictor variables in the generalized additive models, for PT-GAM (A) and T-GAM (B), that utilize the entire study area as training sample. A spline function
for non-parametric smoothing of the variables, s(variable), indicates a nonlinear transformation. The dotted lines represent condence bands. In the plan curvature plot, a negative
value indicates a convergent surface, a positive value indicates a divergent surface, and value of 0 indicates the plan is straight. In the prole curvature plot, a negative value indicates
a convex surface, a positive value indicates a concave surface, and a value of 0 indicates no surface curvature.

varying soil depth. Plan curvature characterizes the convergence and

divergence of topography and near-surface water ow. Together, the
empirical representation of curvature may represent subsurface water
conditions and substrate properties that have an important inuence
on landslide occurrence.
By contrast, the physically-based models SHALSTAB and FS
represent slope shape through the incorporation of a(sin)1.
According to these models, less precipitation is required for instability
when a larger contributing area is providing drainage across specic
width (Dietrich et al., 2001). SHALSTAB and FS do account for the
inuence of acceleration of ow through prole curvature but only
characterize ow down a straight prole.
A key advantage of integrating empirical models with physicallybased models is the ability to compliment the latter with ancillary
process-related variables, such as terrain attributes, geology, and land
use, and to calibrate this combined model at a regional scale. Intensive
and expensive eldwork is required to estimate values for spatially
varying physical model parameters that may only be applicable at a
local scale. Our empirical approach allows us to estimate these values
at a regional scale by parameter optimization, which can be used to
produce models representing a larger area (Lacroix et al., 2002;
Barnett et al. 2004). In our study area soil conditions generally differ
depending on the land use. In general, forest harvesting practices can
change the physical structure of a soil, causing an increase in bulk
density and compaction as well as a decrease in organic matter
(Huang et al., 1996; Merino et al., 1998). In addition, landslides occur
in higher densities in logged areas and areas adjacent to logging roads
(Guthrie, 2002; Guthrie et al., 2010).Therefore, land use data is
incorporated into our model as a proxy for unknown soil conditions,
and proved to be an important factor associated with differences in
landslide density in this study.

5.2. Relationship between FS and terrain attributes

The correlation between slope and log FS varies with physical
parameters and is strongest near the optimized physical parameter

values (Fig. 5B). This requires further interpretation. Slope angle

will have the strongest inuence on FS when



R a
1
T sin

In this case, T/R and a will have no inuence on FS, and only
constants such as C, r and and the spatially variable slope angle will,
resulting in a monotonically decreasing nonlinear function of .
The reverse situation occurs when the specic catchment area (or,
on planar slopes, slope length) is smaller than some threshold
T
sin
R

which decreases towards at areas and is substantially smaller than T/

R. In this case, the monotonic decrease of FS with increasing slope
angle is further modied depending on the specic catchment area,
which could statistically be represented in a GAM by a bivariate
interaction term. In our study, however, the optimal bootstrap T/R
values were often b 100 m, which implied that specic catchment area
inuenced FS only near the ridges, resulting in an extremely strong
correlation with slope.
In order to further explore the potential predictive value of log FS
and its dependence on slope angle, we determined the relationship of
AUROC for PT-GAM and log FS given a range of T/R values (Fig. 5A). Our
expectation was that log FS may improve the PT-GAM whenever its
correlation with (or the less inuential catchment area) is weakest
(Fig. 5B). Correlation with however remains always stronger than
0.80 (weakest for T/R 900 m), and correlation with catchment
area remains weak. The AUROC for PT-GAM is the greatest given a
small T/R near our optimal parameter estimate, though T/R in general
has little inuence on the AUROC of PT-GAM. This conrms the utility
of our optimization strategy for the construction of integrated
physicalempirical models of landslide initiation.

J.N. Goetz et al. / Geomorphology 129 (2011) 376386

5.3. Model comparison

We found that being able to include nonlinear (transformed)
terms or linear (untransformed) terms in the GAM rather than only
linear ones as in the GLM provided only a marginal enhancement of
the landslide susceptibility model (Fig. 6). The predictive and
analytical advantage of GAM over the GLM may become more
prevalent in areas that exhibit stronger nonlinear relationships to
landsliding.
Broadly speaking, the geomorphic processes involved in causing
landslides to occur can in fact be considered to have nonlinearities.
Phillips (2003) discusses that nonlinearity can occur in geomorphic
systems that progress towards a threshold or critical state, a point
where a system changes behaviour. In the case of hillslopes, this can
be observed when it becomes unstable as a consequence of changing
hydrological conditions. Moreover, landslides are a result of multiple
topographic and climatic variables that inuence erosion and
weathering rates, which lead to a progressive transformation and
movement of slope material. Thus, some of the topographic variables
used in our models may be expected to have nonlinear relationships
to the process or conditions they may represent as proxy variables. In
our study, we found that when given the choice to represent the
relationship between hillslope topography (slope and curvature) and
landslide occurrence as nonlinear or linear, the predominant selection
was to include a nonlinear version of the variable (Table 3). The model
improvements between a GAM and GLM were small (Fig. 6);
however, the predominant nonlinear selection of topographic variables provides some empirical evidence for the actual presence of
nonlinearities in these relationships. Therefore, nonlinear regression
techniques, such as the GAM, allow us to capture complex geomorphic
processes that are difcult to represent in a linear form.
The practical needs to delineate relatively small high-risk areas
that contain a large portion of the potentially unstable hillslopes lead
to the determination of sensitivity at a high specicity (Brenning,
2005). This performance measure is more focused than AUROC. It is
key for being able to interpret the ability of a model to differentiate
between classes where it matters for practical purposes. The
limitations especially of SHALSTAB in predicting at a high specicity
can partly be attributed to its hard classication of unconditionally
unstable slopes, which does not provide a means for further
continuously differentiating among the numerous unconditionally
unstable grid cells. These areas are determined only based on the
friction angle, which was assumed to be spatially constant in our
study and in most other published applications of SHALSTAB. The use
of multiple predictor variables in empirical and combined models
may, by contrast, be interpreted in terms of a spatially varying friction
angle that partly depends on geomorphic proxies of substrate
properties or land cover characteristics. While the FS approach is
not subject to the limitation of classifying certain areas into an
unconditionally unstable category, it does however assume the

Table 3
Variable-selection frequencies and percentage of nonlinear occurrence for GAM models
on 100 bootstrap training samples.
Variable

LPT-GAM

LT-GAM

PT-GAM

T-GAM

Distance to road
Logging
Plan curvature
logFS
Prole curvature
Elevation
Slope
log(Q/T)
TWI
log catchment area
Catchment slope

100 (44%)
100
99 (56%)
99 (52%)
93 (75%)
37 (100%)
22 (32%)
21 (33%)
19 (32%)
10 (30%)
9 (33%)

100
100
100

94
39
100

27
16
12

100
98
81
27
32
26
21
23
12

99 (66%)

93 (87%)
25 (100%)
99 (87%)

38 (37%)
21 (14%)
17 (29%)

(44%)
(50%)
(77%)
(91%)
(90%)
(26%)
(25%)
(33%)

(69%)
(52%)
(100%)
(100%)
(31%)
(38%)
(52%)
(22%)
(25%)

385

friction angle to be known and, in most studies, to be constant in

space.
Although the proposed approach of integrating SHALSTAB and FS
with empirical models did not provide a statistically signicant
advantage over the terrain analysis approach in terms of predictive
capabilities in this study area, the results provide better insights into
site characteristics that inuence landsliding. The predictive usefulness of these models may increase in situations where limited
landslide inventory data increases the uncertainties in exible datadriven models, or where additional information on spatially varying
soil physical properties is available from detailed eld studies. We
were able to use statistical techniques to estimate physical parameters
required for physical models, such as and r, for the entire study area.
The location of landslide initiation points is the only actual training
data required to produce our susceptibility models. Our model
comparison strategy based on resampling-based error estimation
provides a general framework that can be applied to guide model
selection in an unbiased way (Brenning, 2005).
On the other hand, the integration of both model types may also
provide directions for improving physically-based slope stability
models. The PT-GAM indicates that plan and prole curvature contain
signicant information that may be used to improve the FS model in
our study area. Specically, local convergence and local concavity
appear to constitute more important inuences on landslide initiation
than reected by the specic catchment area in the FS model, which
partly reects the average upslope plan curvature, and not primarily
local slope geometry. The actual physical link may be related to
spatially varying soil thickness or sediment types with different
friction angles and densities, which are approximated by curvature
variables as proxies for the underlying processes of erosion and
deposition. This interpretation is supported by previous statistical
analyses in forested mountain areas that found that spatially varying
soil thickness is a function of ow accumulation and acceleration,
which are characterized by prole and plan curvature (Rahman et al.,
1996; Heimsath et al., 1999).
6. Conclusions
The application of novel statistical techniques, such as the GAM
and bootstrap method for bias-reduced error estimation, to combine
physically-based and empirical models for landslide susceptibility
modeling was explored in this study. It is found that this method can
enhance physically-based slope stability models in terms of their
predictive performance, and improve the interpretability of empirical
models.
Nonlinear enhancements of the GLM achieved by applying the
GAM only provided marginal improvements in predictive performance, but appear to better reect the often nonlinear response of
slope stability to varying site conditions, whether it is slope angle or
distance from an anthropogenic disturbance.
Incorporating physically-based models, SHALSTAB and FS, into the
empirical modeling and parameter estimation framework provided
physical meaning to the susceptibility models by spatially representing hillslope processes, but did not achieve a performance improvement compared to purely terrain-based empirical models. Terrain
attribute information was used as a proxy for natural geophysical site
conditions that may increase the predisposition to landslide initiation,
and land use variables provided additional important information on
anthropogenically modied site conditions.
Plan and prole curvature, in addition to slope, were found to be
important modiers of slope stability in our study. Landslide
susceptibility is maximized on steep hillslopes that have an upwardly
concave prole and convergent plan curvature. An advantage of using
terrain attribute information in an empirical model was allowing for
the incorporation of different curvatures (convex, concave or plane)
for prole and plan curvature. In contrast, FS and SHALTAB do account

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J.N. Goetz et al. / Geomorphology 129 (2011) 376386

for different plan curvatures in the upslope contributing area indirectly through the specic catchment factor, however no information
on the slope prole is incorporated into these models. Therefore, the
inclusion of an empirical variable for prole curvature is important to
represent the potential range of ow and inltration characteristics
for different prole curvatures that the physically-based landslides
susceptibility models may not account for.
Overall, the methods implemented in this study, which combine
empirical and physically-based approaches and include bias-reduced
error estimation, were presented as a general framework to enhance
the analysis of performance for landslide susceptibility models. In
addition, the use of a nonlinear regression technique, such as the
GAM, demonstrated the importance of representing the nonlinear
relationships of predictor variables of landslide occurrence, which
allows for a more exible and interpretable analysis of landslide
susceptibility.
Acknowledgements
This research was funded through an NSERC Discovery Grant
Individual awarded to A. Brenning. We acknowledge constructive
comments provided by the anonymous referees.
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