Quantitative analysis of the effect of human migration on the landslides after the 2010 Haiti earthquake using Landsat imagery

The 2010 Haiti earthquake displaced millions of people and induced numerous landslides. Migrants triggered staggering deforestation since new settlers need wooden resources. This deforestation caused soil degradation, erosion, flooding, and landslides. The purpose of this study is to explore the impact of human displacement on landslide distribution and its frequency changes by comparing land use and land cover (LULC) maps of pre- and post-earthquake landslide distributions in Port-au-Prince, Artibonite, and Grande Anse. To assess the impact of anthropogenic activities on landslides, we employed a maximum likelihood method to produce LULC maps from Landsat images from 2002 to 2015. Landslide inventory maps were created through visual detection from high resolution satellite imagery. LULC characteristics of new landslide areas were assessed to find land cover types experienced landslides and their distribution characteristics, along with the changes in human influx. The result shows that there was no obvious increase in the number of landslides in forested land after the earthquake while grassland and barren showed an increase in the number of landslides (22% in Port-au-Prince and 77.1% in Artibonite, respectively). Migrants had not explored the forest because there were not enough resources to access remote areas and cut down trees. Since the human migration are more likely to be occurred in grassland and barren, anthropogenic impacts were more evident.