Landslide Susceptibility of Kavaja, Albania

In this paper, a GIS-based methodology has been used to produce a landslide susceptibility map of Kavaja located in central-western part of Albania. The landslide inventory was compiled at 1:25,000 scale through: field reconnaissance to investigate landslide occurrences, collection of historic information of landslides from the Central Archive of the Albanian Geological Survey and interpretation of landslide occurrences from aerial photographs coupled with field verification. For this study the Bivariate approach was used to obtain the susceptibility map. In order to explain these landslides, six landslide casual factor maps were selected and prepared in GIS: geology, slope, aspect, land-use, distance from stream, and seismicity. The landslide susceptibility map is the combination of all Wij of each factor. The final landslide susceptibility map of the study area indicates that the low, moderate, high classes respectively cover 129.7 km2 (84 %), 14.3 km2 (9 %), 10.5 km2 (7 %) of the study area. The high landslide susceptibility zones are predominantly characterized by: the geological features N1 2(h)c, slope angles between 10° and 25° and West facing exposition slope and Northeast facing slope, the land-use features are urban areas and shrubs, distance from stream 0–25 m, and earthquake zone with magnitude M > 3.5 and I > VII.