Corina NICORICI¹, James GRAY¹, Alexandru M. IMBROANE² & Mihail BARBOSU^3
1University of Montreal, Dept. of Geography, 520 Chemin de la Côte-Ste-Catherine, Montreal, Canada, corina.nicorici@mtq.gouv.qc.ca, grayj@geog.umontreal.ca
²Babes-Bolyai University, Faculty of Geography, Clinicilor str. 5-7, Cluj-Napoca, Romania, alex@geografie.ubbcluj.ro
³State University of New York at Brockport, Dept. of Mathematics, 350 New Campus Dr., Brockport, NY, USA, mbarbosu@brockport.edu

GIS SUSCEPTIBILITY MAPS FOR SHALLOW LANDSLIDES: A CASE STUDY IN TRANSYLVANIA, ROMANIA

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The Geographical Information System (GIS) has become an important tool for landslide susceptibility mapping because it provides an efficient way of handling, processing and analyzing geospatial data. This paper reports a GIS model based on the factor of safety in order to generate susceptibility maps for shallow landslides in an area located within the Transylvanian Basin, Romania. The latter, most frequently involve reactivation of pre-existing escarpments associated with former deep-seated landslides known locally as glimee. The computation of the factor of safety is made using spatially variable parameters that include soil cohesion and angle of internal friction, the position of the water table and the bulk density of the material. This study is the first of this kind for the study area and has the advantage of being interactive, giving the user the opportunity to change the parameters.