Analysis on Vegetation Phenology Characteristics of Landslide

This paper presents a study to identify the relationship between vegetation phenology and landslide using remote sensing to access landslide prone areas in an event of an earthquake. A landslide triggered after the April 2015 earthquake in Manaslu Conservation Area in Gorkha District of Nepal was used as a study site. The method proposed in the paper uses pre- and post-event LANDSAT8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) images and uses Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) for understanding the correlation between vegetation phenology of the study site to the landslide. Comparative study of the result shows lower NDVI mean value after the earthquake and shows that a slope with NDVI mean value lower than 0.247 could be landslide prone. Implication of the result, if confirmed, could aid in identifying landslide prone areas and implementing mitigation programs to either re-vegetate the slope or relocate residents directly under threat.