Landslide Susceptibility Assessment of a Part of the Western Ghats (India) Employing the AHP and F-AHP Models and Comparison with Existing Susceptibility Maps

Landslides are prevalent in the Western Ghats, and incidences that happened 2021 Koottickal area of Kottayam district (Western Ghats) resulted loss 10 lives. The objectives this study to assess landslide susceptibility high-range local self-governments (LSGs) using analytical hierarchy process (AHP) fuzzy-AHP (F-AHP) models compare performance existing susceptible maps. This never witnessed any massive landslides dimension, which warrants necessity relooking into landslide-susceptible models. For AHP F-AHP modeling, ten conditioning factors were selected: slope, soil texture, land use/land cover (LULC), geomorphology, road buffer, lithology, satellite image-derived indices such as normalized difference index (NDRLI), water (NDWI), burn ratio (NBR), soil-adjusted vegetation (SAVI). zones categorized three: low, moderate, high. validation maps created receiver operating characteristic (ROC) technique ascertained performances AHP, F-AHP, TISSA excellent, with an under ROC curve (AUC) value above 0.80, NCESS map acceptable, AUC 0.70. Though is negligible, prepared model has better (AUC = 0.889) than 0.872), 0.867), 0.789) employing other matrices accuracy, mean absolute error (MAE), root square (RMSE) also confirmed (0.869, 0.226, 0.122, respectively) performance, followed by (0.856, 0.243, 0.147, respectively), (0.855, 0.249, 0.159, (0.770, 0.309, 0.177, most landslide-inducing identified through LULC, NDRLI. Koottickal, Poonjar-Thekkekara, Moonnilavu, Thalanad, Koruthodu LSGs highly landslides. identification areas diversified techniques will aid decision-makers identifying critical infrastructure at risk alternate routes for emergency evacuation people safer terrain during exigency.