The Eastern Black Sea Region is regarded as the most prone to landslides in Turkey due to its geological, geographical, and climatic characteristics. Landslides in this region inflict both fatalities and significant economic damage. The main objective of this study was to create landslide susceptibility maps (LSMs) using tree-based ensemble learning algorithms for the Ardeşen and Fındıklı districts of Rize Province, which is the second-most-prone province in terms of landslides within the Eastern Black Sea Region, after Trabzon. In the study, Random Forest (RF), Gradient Boosting Machine (GBM), CatBoost, and Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) were used as tree-based machine learning algorithms. Thus, comparing the prediction performances of these algorithms was established as the second aim of the study. For this purpose, 14 conditioning factors were used to create LMSs. The conditioning factors are: lithology, altitude, land cover, aspect, slope, slope length and steepness factor (LS-factor), plan and profile curvatures, tree cover density, topographic position index, topographic wetness index, distance to drainage, distance to roads, and distance to faults. The total data set, which includes landslide and non-landslide pixels, was split into two parts: training data set (70%) and validation data set (30%). The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC-ROC) method was used to evaluate the prediction performances of the models. The AUC values showed that the CatBoost (AUC = 0.988) had the highest prediction performance, followed by XGBoost (AUC = 0.987), RF (AUC = 0.985), and GBM (ACU = 0.975) algorithms. Although the AUC values of the models were close to each other, the CatBoost performed slightly better than the other models. These results showed that especially CatBoost and XGBoost models can be used to reduce landslide damages in the study area.

Inexpensive and small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) provide high-accuracy positional data and enable users to collect high-resolution aerial images. The analysis of images captured using UAVs in a specific reference system is traditionally accomplished using the georeferencing method with high-accuracy ground control points (GCPs). This study aims to test and compare the benchmarks and point clouds’ positional accuracy produced on three consecutive days with different flight combinations at 75 and 100 m flight altitude by means of network-based continuously operating reference stations and differential-based real-time kinematic georeferencing systems without using GCPs. A root mean squared error values were obtained 1–3 cm for the horizontal accuracy and 4–6 cm for the vertical accuracy values. Thus, the proposed system proved an acceptable positional accuracy level. According to the results of the proposed approach, it can be said that the evaluation and use of UAV data without using GCPs is within an adequate range for various mapping purposes.