Land Suitability Analysis of Different Plant Species to Rehabilitate Landslide Prone Areas in Merawu Catchment, Indonesia

Watershed Laboratory, Department of Forest Resources Conservation, Faculty of Forestry Universitas Gadjah Mada, Yogyakarta 55281, Indonesia

^* Corresponding author: marhaento@ugm.ac.id

Abstract

The physical condition and the increasing changes of land use accompanied by inappropriate land management in Banjarnegara Regency potentially cause landslides. One way to handle this is land rehabilitation, which has land suitability as the main factor for its success. This study aims to map landslide-prone areas and determine the appropriate types of plants from six types of rehabilitation plants, namely acacia, sengon, mahogany, durian, jackfruit, and cashew to reduce the risk of landslides in the Merawu Sub-basin. Mapping landslide-prone area is done with scoring and weighting methods for each landslide parameter while plotting plant types uses matching method to determine plant species suitability by matching growing place requirements and land characteristics. Results showed that Merawu Catchment was dominated by High and Very High landslide susceptibility, with Wanayasa Subdistrict being the sub-district with the largest percentage of both areas and no plant species determined Very Suitable (S1) in landslide-prone areas. Based on analysis results, plant species suitable for High and Very High landslide susceptibility are as follows: sengon covering 5,781.54 ha (98.08%) and 8,084.64 ha (99.63%), durian covering of 104.34 ha (1.77%) and 16.3 ha (15,79%), and cashew covering of 8.67 ha (0.15%) and 13.4 ha (0,17%%).