A landslide susceptibility map (LSM) is of vital importance for risk recognition and prevention. In the last decade, statistical methods have gradually exerted their impact on mapping the landslide susceptibility to locate the high-risk places of landslide. However, due to the complexity of getting full access to the thematic information in large scenarios, most of these statistical methods generally suffer from overfitting, inadequate representative power, and the inability to transfer the learned representation to other places. To solve these challenges, this study designed an unsupervised representation learning module, which features independence, compactness, robustness, and transferability. Specifically, we first stack restricted Boltzmann machines and denoising autoencoder to unsupervised discover the underlying representations embedded in the thematic maps. Then, we applied the transferring strategy in an adversarial manner to generalize the learned representations to the sample-scarce area. Experimental results and analyses using data in different regions have revealed that the proposed method can be generalized well between different LSM scenarios. In terms of precision, it outperforms other methods by a large margin, e.g., by around 7% compared to multilayer perceptrons with the same configuration, and by 3%–4% to the state of art algorithm random forest. Besides, compared to other methods, the landslide susceptibility map that is predicted by the proposed method featuring smoothness and stableness seems more reliable, and is more according to some prior knowledge that, for example, distance to the drainage, slope, and stratum, should exert dominant effects on the occurrence of a landslide.

Automatic road extraction from remote-sensing imagery plays an important role in many applications. However, accurate and efficient extraction from very high-resolution (VHR) images remains difficult because of, for example, increased data size and superfluous details, the spatial and spectral diversity of road targets, disturbances (e.g., vehicles, shadows of trees, and buildings), the necessity of finding weak road edges while avoiding noise, and the fast-acquisition requirement of road information for crisis response. To solve these difficulties, a two-stage method combining edge information and region characteristics is presented. In the first stage, convolutions are executed by applying Gabor wavelets in the best scale to detect Gabor features with location and orientation information. The features are then merged into one response map for connection analysis. In the second stage, highly complete, connected Gabor features are used as edge constraints to facilitate stable object segmentation and limit region growing. Finally, segmented objects are evaluated by some fundamental shape features to eliminate nonroad objects. The results indicate the validity and superiority of the proposed method to efficiently extract accurate road targets from VHR remote-sensing images.

Large earthquakes can trigger landslides that reshape mountain landscapes within minutes, yet their geomorphic legacy can unfold over millennia. A fundamental question is whether a major earthquake leaves hillslopes in a less or more stable state for the next. Here we exploit two sequential earthquakes (2013 and 2022) at close to the same location near Lushan, China, to quantify how the first event preconditions hillslope failure during the second. The 2013 earthquake produced a dual effect: Regional susceptibility declined as unstable material was removed, yet localized coseismic damage weakened a different population of hillslopes that later failed in 2022. These opposing outcomes generate three damage-recovery pathways of hillslope response that define how mass is redistributed and mechanical strength reorganizes according to a prolonged “hillslope memory” with implications for the landscape evolution of mountain belts. Hillslope response to sequential earthquakes is fundamentally path dependent, demanding landslide hazard assessments that explicitly incorporate history.