Workflow Narrative

Landslide Susceptibility Assessment

Problem It Solves

Which areas present elevated slope-failure risk today, and where is trigger pressure most concerning?

Who It Is For

Hazard analysts, corridor planners, and geotechnical screening teams.

Primary User

Geological surveys, transportation agencies, and hazard consulting teams.

What It Does

Estimates terrain-driven landslide susceptibility from slope/curvature context.
Integrates optional rainfall pressure to strengthen trigger interpretation.
Produces susceptibility, trigger-pressure, and confidence rasters with contract summary diagnostics.

How It Works

Computes local slope and roughness/curvature proxies from DEM neighborhood derivatives.
Blends terrain susceptibility with optional rainfall intensity to form trigger pressure.
Applies profile-weighted scaling and thresholding to output susceptibility, confidence, and risk zones.
Indicative formula: susceptibility ~= w1*slope_term + w2*roughness_term; trigger ~= susceptibility * (1 + rainfall_term).

Why It Wins

Provides reproducible hazard screening outputs with structured summary metrics for downstream reporting.

Typical Buying Trigger

A public or infrastructure program requires defensible first-pass landslide risk zoning.

Typical Presets

fast for rapid regional screening.
balanced for standard hazard screening.
conservative for stricter slope/curvature sensitivity.

Inputs

Parameter	Optional	Description
dem	no	Digital elevation model used as the terrain reference surface.
optional rainfall_intensity	yes	Optional rainfall forcing raster used to refine landslide trigger pressure estimation.
profile: fast \| balanced \| conservative	no	Processing profile controlling sensitivity, quality strictness, and runtime tradeoffs.
susceptibility_threshold	no	Threshold used to convert continuous susceptibility into risk-zone candidates.

Outputs

Parameter	Type	Description
susceptibility	GeoTIFF	Landslide susceptibility raster used to identify unstable terrain.
trigger_pressure	GeoTIFF	Trigger-pressure raster indicating forcing required to initiate failures.
confidence	GeoTIFF	Confidence layer quantifying reliability of modeled outputs.
risk_zones	GeoPackage	Priority vector polygons highlighting intervention zones.
summary	JSON	Machine-readable summary report containing run metadata, QA diagnostics, and key metrics.
html_report	HTML	Human-readable customer-facing report generated from the summary contract for stakeholder review and QA traceability.

Python Example

import whitebox_workflows as wbw

wbe = wbw.WbEnvironment(include_pro=True, tier="pro")

sus, trig, conf, zones, summary = wbe.landslide_susceptibility_assessment(
    dem="data/dem.tif",
    rainfall_intensity="data/rainfall_intensity.tif",
    profile="balanced",
    susceptibility_threshold=0.65,
    max_zone_features=5000,
    output_prefix="output/landslide",
)

print(sus)
print(trig)
print(conf)
print(zones)
print(summary)

License Notice

Use of this function requires a license for Whitebox Workflows Professional (WbW-Pro). Please visit www.whiteboxgeo.com to purchase a license.

Project Links

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