Large-Area Landslides Monitoring Using Advanced Multi-Temporal InSAR Technique over the Giant Panda Habitat, Sichuan, China

The region near Dujiangyan City and Wenchuan County, Sichuan China, including significant giant panda habitats, was severely impacted by the Wenchuan earthquake. Largearea landslides occurred and seriously threatened the lives of people and giant pandas. In this paper, we report the development of an enhanced multi-temporal interferometric synthetic aperture radar (MTInSAR) methodology to monitor potential post-seismic landslides by analyzing coherent scatterers (CS) and distributed scatterers (DS) points extracted from multi-temporal L-band ALOS/PALSAR data in an integrated manner. Through the integration of phase optimization and mitigation of the orbit and topography-related phase errors, surface deformations in the study area were derived: the rates in the line of sight (LOS) direction ranged from −7 to 1.5 cm/a. Dozens of potential landslides, distributed mainly along the Minjiang River, Longmenshan Fault, and in other the high-altitude areas were detected. These findings matched the distribution of previous landslides. InSAR-derived results demonstrated that some previous landslides were still active; many unstable slopes have developed, and there are significant probabilities of future massive failures. The impact OPEN ACCESS Remote Sens. 2015, 7 8926 of landslides on the giant panda habitat, however ranged from low to moderate, would continue to be a concern for conservationists for some time in the future.