Comparing GIS-Multicriteria Decision Analysis for landslide susceptibility mapping for the lake basin, Iran

In this study, three different GIS-Multicriteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) methods were applied to landslide susceptibility mapping (LSM) for the Urmia lake basin, Iran. Nine landslide causal factors were used, whereby parameters were extracted from an associated spatial database. These factors were evaluated, and then the respective factor weight and class weight were assigned to each of the associated factors. The landslide susceptibility maps were produced based on GIS based MCDA methods including Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), Weighted Linear Combination (WLC) and Ordered Weighted Average (OWA). An existing inventory of known landslides within the case study area was compared with the resulting susceptibility maps. Results indicated the AHP performed best in the landslide susceptibility mapping closely followed by the OWA method while the WLC method delivered significantly poorer results.