Geospatial Analysis of Mass-Wasting Susceptibility of Four Small Catchments in Mountainous Area of Miyun County, Beijing

Driven by the pull of gravity, mass-wasting comprises all of the sedimentary processes related to remobilization of sediments deposited on slopes, including creep, sliding, slumping, flow, and fall. It is vital to conduct mass-wasting susceptibility mapping, with the aim of providing decision makers with management advice. The current study presents two individual data mining methods—the frequency ratio (FR) and information value model (IVM) methods—to map mass-wasting susceptibility in four catchments in Miyun County, Beijing, China. To achieve this goal, nine influence factors and a mass-wasting inventory map were used and produced, respectively. In this study, 71 mass-wasting locations were investigated in the field. Of these hazard locations, 70% of them were randomly selected to build the model, and the remaining 30% of the hazard locations were used for validation. Finally, a receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve was used to assess the mass-wasting susceptibility maps produced by the above-mentioned models. Results show that the FR had a higher concordance and spatial differentiation, with respective values of 0.902 (area under the success rate) and 0.883 (area under the prediction rate), while the IVM had lower values of 0.865 (area under the success rate) and 0.855 (area under the prediction rate). Both proposed methodologies are useful for general planning and evaluation purposes, and they are shown to be reasonable models. Slopes of 6–21° were the most common thresholds that controlled occurrence of mass-wasting. Farmland terraces were mainly composed of gravel, mud, and clay, which are more prone to mass-wasting. Mass-wasting susceptibility mapping is feasible and potentially highly valuable. It could provide useful information in support of environmental health policies.