Susceptibility assessment of geological hazards in Wuhua District of Kuming, China using the weight evidence method

Geological hazard susceptibility assessment is an important basis for territorial space planning and geological hazard prevention and mitigation. In order to explore the evaluation method suitable for the geological hazard susceptibility of low hills and gullies in Yunnan plateau, Wuhua District of Kunming, Yunnan Province, China was selected as a typical study area. Eight factors including the engineering geology groups, distance from faults, elevation, slope, direction, curvature, distance from roads and land use covers were selected, and the weight evidence method based on Bayesian theory was applied to evaluate the susceptibility of geological hazards. After performing the Student-T test of the comprehensive evidence weight of each factor, the classification scheme of factors were optimized. The results of vulnerability zoning based on the evaluation of the model established in this paper showed that 89.9% and 9.1% of the geological hazard points fall into high and medium susceptibility areas. The comparative analysis showed that the modeling results are highly consistent with the geological hazards distribution, which better reveals the characteristics of geological hazards susceptibility in the study area. It can provide reference for the planning of geological hazards prevention in Wuhua District and other low hills and gullies areas of Yunnan plateau.