Event-Based Landslide Modeling in the Styrian Basin, Austria: Accounting for Time-Varying Rainfall and Land Cover

In June 2009 and September 2014, the Styrian Basin in Austria was affected by extreme events of heavy thunderstorms, triggering thousands of landslides. Since the relationship between intense rainfall, land cover/land use (LULC), and landslide occurrences is still not fully understood, our objective was to develop a model design that allows to assess landslide susceptibility specifically for past triggering events. We used generalized additive models (GAM) to link land surface, geology, meteorological, and LULC variables to observed slope failures. Accounting for the temporal variation in landslide triggering, we implemented an innovative spatio-temporal approach for landslide absence sampling. We assessed model performance using k-fold cross-validation in space and time to estimate the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC). Furthermore, we analyzed the variable importance and its relationship to landslide occurrence. Our results showed that the models had on average acceptable to outstanding landslide discrimination capabilities (0.81–0.94 mAUROC in space and 0.72–0.95 mAUROC in time). Furthermore, meteorological and LULC variables were of great importance in explaining the landslide events (e.g., five-day rainfall 13.6–17.8% mean decrease in deviance explained), confirming their usefulness in landslide event analysis. Based on the present findings, future studies may assess the potential of this approach for developing future storylines of slope instability based on climate and LULC scenarios.