Land Use/Land Cover Change as a Preparatory Factor for Shallow Landslide Susceptibility: A Multi-Temporal Approach in the Messina Area (Italy)

The role of land use/land cover (LULC) dynamics in predisposing slopes to shallow landsliding is widely acknowledged but seldom translated into operational susceptibility modelling. Most data-driven approaches still treat LULC as a static factor, neglecting the legacy effects of recent transitions. This study presents a methodological framework to quantify the influence of multi-temporal LULC changes on shallow landslide initiation and to incorporate this information into susceptibility mapping. The procedure was tested in the Metropolitan City of Messina (formerly known as the Province of Messina), Southern Italy, a representative Mediterranean area repeatedly affected by rainfall-triggered slope failures. Freely available LULC maps from 1990 to 2006 were processed through post-classification change detection to identify dominant land cover trajectories. Preliminary analyses within buffer areas showed higher landslide indices (LI, LAI) and Frequency Ratios for some transition classes, suggesting a potential role of LULC changes. These findings motivated the comparison between a static LULC configuration and a dynamic one incorporating the detected transitions within a Frequency Ratio susceptibility model. The dynamic model did not improve the mean Area Under the Curve (AUC) compared to the static model (0.7774 vs. 0.7742), and the observed reduction in variability across five independent random splits (standard deviation 0.012 vs. 0.064) should be considered preliminary. The proposed workflow, based entirely on open data and GIS-based processing, offers a transparent and reproducible methodology for integrating LULC transitions into dynamic susceptibility maps. The use of higher-resolution input data could potentially reduce the scale mismatch and improve the detection of fine-scale transitions, supporting more effective landslide risk mitigation and evidence-based land planning.