Quantifying volumetric erosion from symbolic expression of landslide morphology
Abstract
Landslide volumetric erosion is fundamental to regional sediment budgets and downstream hazard assessment, yet accurately constraining material mobilization remains a primary bottleneck in Earth-system research. Legacy area–volume relations introduce substantial uncertainty when applied across heterogeneous landslide populations. Here, we examine whether the erosional and accumulation (i.e., runout) domains provide information beyond source area alone for volumetric erosion. Using neural-guided symbolic regression, we identify an expression that preserves source area as the first-order control on erosional volume while introducing a dimensionless descriptor of the accumulation counterpart, as a geometric correction. For the 2016 Kaikōura earthquake inventory, the framework estimates a cumulative eroded volume of 54.9 Mm3, compared with the measured 56.5 Mm3. The formulation was additionally applied without recalibration to the independent 2018 Hokkaidō inventory and subsequently used for blind inference on 32 landslides from the 2013 Lushan earthquake, yielding a cumulative estimate of 1.95 Mm3 of volumetric erosion. Because independent volume observations are unavailable for Lushan, this application is treated as inference rather than external validation. Polygon-generalization experiments further indicate that our new formulation remains stable across different mapping resolutions. These results show that scale-normalized planform geometry can provide complementary information to source area when constraining landslide erosion. The proposed framework is therefore intended as an empirical extension to, rather than a replacement for, established area–volume scaling.
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BibTeX
@misc{bhuyan2026quantifying,
title = {{Quantifying volumetric erosion from symbolic expression of landslide morphology}},
author = {Kushanav Bhuyan and Xuanmei Fan and Chengyong Fang and Lorenzo Nava and Xin Wang and Jie Liu and Maximillian Van Wyk De Vries and Filippo Catani and Ugur Öztürk and Luigi Lombardo},
howpublished = {EarthArXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.31223/x5qn5c},
url = {https://eartharxiv.org/repository/view/15349/},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Quantifying volumetric erosion from symbolic expression of landslide morphology
AU - Kushanav Bhuyan
AU - Xuanmei Fan
AU - Chengyong Fang
AU - Lorenzo Nava
AU - Xin Wang
AU - Jie Liu
AU - Maximillian Van Wyk De Vries
AU - Filippo Catani
AU - Ugur Öztürk
AU - Luigi Lombardo
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/11
PB - EarthArXiv
DO - 10.31223/x5qn5c
UR - https://eartharxiv.org/repository/view/15349/
AB - Landslide volumetric erosion is fundamental to regional sediment budgets and downstream hazard assessment, yet accurately constraining material mobilization remains a primary bottleneck in Earth-system research. Legacy area–volume relations introduce substantial uncertainty when applied across heterogeneous landslide populations. Here, we examine whether the erosional and accumulation (i.e., runout) domains provide information beyond source area alone for volumetric erosion. Using neural-guided symbolic regression, we identify an expression that preserves source area as the first-order control on erosional volume while introducing a dimensionless descriptor of the accumulation counterpart, as a geometric correction. For the 2016 Kaikōura earthquake inventory, the framework estimates a cumulative eroded volume of 54.9 Mm3, compared with the measured 56.5 Mm3. The formulation was additionally applied without recalibration to the independent 2018 Hokkaidō inventory and subsequently used for blind inference on 32 landslides from the 2013 Lushan earthquake, yielding a cumulative estimate of 1.95 Mm3 of volumetric erosion. Because independent volume observations are unavailable for Lushan, this application is treated as inference rather than external validation. Polygon-generalization experiments further indicate that our new formulation remains stable across different mapping resolutions. These results show that scale-normalized planform geometry can provide complementary information to source area when constraining landslide erosion. The proposed framework is therefore intended as an empirical extension to, rather than a replacement for, established area–volume scaling.
ER -