Susceptibility Assessment of Debris Flows Coupled with Ecohydrological Activation in the Eastern Qinghai-Tibet Plateau

作者：Hu Jiang, Qiang Zou, Bin Zhou, Zhenru Hu, Cong Li, Shunyu Yao, Hongkun Yao · 发表于：Remote Sensing · 年份：2022 · DOI：10.3390/rs14061444 · 被引用次数：24 · 研究领域：Landslides and related hazards、Hydrology and Sediment Transport Processes、Cryospheric studies and observations

The eastern margin of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau is an extreme topography transition zone, and characterized by significant vegetation zonation, in addition to geographic features (such as enormous topographic relief and active tectonics) that control the occurrence of debris flows, which are rapid, surging flows of water-charged clastic sediments moving along a steep channel and are one of the most dangerous mountain hazards in this region. There is thus an urgent need in this region to conduct a regional-scale debris flow susceptibility assessment to determine the spatial likelihood of a debris flow occurrence and guarantee the safety of people and property, in addition to the smooth operation of the Sichuan-Tibet transport corridor. It is, however, a challenging task to estimate the region’s debris flow susceptibility while taking into consideration the comprehensive impacts of vegetation on the occurrence of debris flows, such as the positive effect of root anchoring and the negative effect of vegetation weight loads. In this study, a novel regional-scale susceptibility assessment method was constructed by integrating state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms (such as support vector classification (SVC), random forest (RF), and eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGB)) with the removing outliers (RO) algorithm and particle swarm optimization (PSO), allowing the impacts of vegetation on debris flow initiation to be integrated with the topographical conditions, hydrological condit...