# Influence of Earthquakes on Landslide Susceptibility in a Seismic Prone Catchment in Central Asia
## 5 Conclusions  
To date, the risk monitoring program plays an increasingly important role in emergency management because it can strengthen the sustainable development of society, the economy, and the environment [78]. As the first step of the risk monitoring program, an understanding of earthquake-induced landslides by means of the modelling approaches is essential in the landslide risk management process. This is especially important in Central Asia, where a large number of radioactive legacy sites are likely to be destroyed under the effect of landslides, leading to immeasurable environmental and political problems. A combined assessment of both LSI and VOL under a series of earthquake scenarios can undoubtedly (1) deepen the understanding of the formation mechanism and the process of landslides in the seismic prone areas and (2) assist the disaster management authorities to develop site-specific mitigation measures for landslide hazards, in order to avoid damages to the infrastructure and facilities, as well as loss of human lives in the future.  
This study concluded that the susceptibility level rose with the increase in earthquake strength, and the upstream areas were more seismically vulnerable than the downstream areas in the Mailuu-Suu catchment. The developed maps of LSI and VOL can serve as a guideline to trigger more detailed, site-specific investigations and analyses in this catchment. The identification of important triggers of landslides shall be considered by the local stakeholders and decision-makers in the landscape administration and land use design; in particular, localities of new infrastructures and facilities should be far from fault lines and areas with high precipitation, slope, and elevation in the Mailuu-Suu catchment. Although forests were not classified as stable areas in this study, proper land use planning and strict forest preservation measures are still highly recommended, as the bare areas were more vulnerable to landslides than forests within the same elevation zones. We are also aware that optimal input data and adequate calibration data from the historical earthquake-induced landslide events are necessary to perform an ideal model. The follow-up calibration studies are, therefore, needed in order to increase the simulation precision of physically-based models. Last but not least, the proposed modelling approaches in this study can save human and financial resources for the intensive _in situ_ measurements of geometric profiles over space and time, and shall be, therefore, recommended for other geological disaster-prone regions that are either not reachable due to the natural geographical barriers or poorly equipped in terms of earthquake and landslide measurement technology.  
Conceptualization, F.L., C.K. and P.S.; methodology, F.L.; software, F.L.; validation, F.L.; formal analysis, F.L.; investigation, F.L., C.K. and P.S.; resources, F.L., C.K. and P.S.; data curation, F.L., C.K. and P.S.; writing--original draft preparation, F.L.; writing--review and editing, I.T., D.Z., M.L., B.T., A.B., C.K. and P.S.; visualization, F.L.; supervision, C.K. and P.S.; project administration, C.K. and P.S.; funding acquisition, C.K. and P.S. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.  
This research was funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research of Germany (BMBF), grant numbers 03G0879A and 03G0879C.  
We sincerely thank all contributors for the data collection. We kindly recognize the valuable comments of the anonymous reviewers that have helped to improve the quality of this work.  
The authors declare no conflict of interest.