Aug 2026· iScience· Vol 29, pp. 117271· 0 citations· 85 references
Medicine
Abstract
Summary Landslide hazard models worldwide assume that vegetation stabilizes slopes monotonically, so that denser vegetation always implies greater stability. Analyzing 12,459 rainfall-triggered landslides (2000–2024) with multi-source satellite data, we find a “vegetation paradox”: landslide susceptibility does not decline monotonically with vegetation density but peaks within a critical transition zone (CTZ) at NDVI, 0.769–0.868—a unimodal, non-monotonic pattern. This zone concentrates 23.0% of the full 18,028-event inventory (33.2% of the 12,459 analyzed with reliable NDVI) and persists across biomes, climate zones, and slope classes (16.7%–44.5% CTZ prevalence across the gentle-to-steep range), and its upper boundary is stable across data-quality filtering, density smoothing, and simulated sensor noise. An independent grid-based Random Forest (R2 = 0.446) independently places this maximum within the CTZ (mean NDVI, 0.860) without histogram binning; its coarse grid, however, captures only the rising limb and cannot resolve the decline above the CTZ.
Landslide susceptibility assessment is critical in the mountainous terrains of northern Algeria, where weak marly formations, active tectonics, and seasonally concentrated rainfall converge to produce recurrent slope instability. This study develops a locally calibrated susceptibility assessment for the Amoucha sector...
Under extreme rainfall and vegetation restoration, clustered shallow landslides have occurred in some watersheds on the Loess Plateau. Accurately assessing landslide probability and understanding vegetation effects are critical for hazard prevention. Using an improved SINMAP model with two topographic wetness condition...
Yang-Guang Xu, Li Luo, Wen-Zhao Guo et al.· Journal of Environmental Man...· 0 citations
Cloud cover impacts Earth's radiation budget as both a cause and an effect of climate change. While long-term satellite observations are vital for climate studies, existing products are limited by coarse resolutions that fail to capture fine-scale cloud heterogeneity. Despite the five-decade Landsat archive, global...
Yin Yang, Peng Li, Suresh Chand Rai et al.· Journal of Climate· 0 citations
This study examines January–March Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI)-detected vegetation, its spatial morphology and its co-location with a fixed population surface in Riyadh Governorate, Saudi Arabia, for 2018–2026. Seasonal Sentinel-2 Level-2A median composites were thresholded at NDVI 0.20, 0.30 and 0.40...
F. M. Alotaibi, I. Andronache, I. Liritzis· Land· 0 citations
Vegetation growth is increasingly threatened by both extreme climate events and anthropogenic disturbances. Although considerable attention has been given to detecting large-scale vegetation anomalies, comprehensive analyses of the spatiotemporal dynamics of negative extreme anomalies in vegetation growth (NEGs) and th...
Hao-Xiang Zhao, Jing-Feng Xiao, Wei Li et al.· Global Change Biology· 0 citations
