Identifying Landslides Prone-Areas Using GIS-based Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process Model in Ziz Upper Watershed (Morocco)

Landslides cause massive damage to human lives, infrastructure, and property in many regions of the world. These disasters arise on unstable slopes in mountainous regions. The recent increase in these incidents in many regions, including Morocco, has attracted more attention to their study. In this paper, a combination of (GIS) techniques, fuzzy logic and analytical hierarchy process (FAHP) were integrated to model landslide susceptibility in the upper Ziz catchment, southeast Morocco. The data used for this purpose included several geo-environmental and climatic factors affecting susceptibility to landslides. The results of this modeling showed that 16.7% of the studied area has a high susceptibility to landslides, and that the upstream western part is considered the most susceptible. Evaluation of the resulting map’s accuracy using the inventory of 148 landslide events showed that the FAHP model has an important performance, as the value of the area under the curve (AUC) was about 0.885.