1.Engineering Research Center of the Three Gorges Reservoir Region′s Eco-Environment,Ministry of Education,China Three Gorges University,Yichang,Hubei 443002,China
2.National Engineering Research Center of Eco-Environment in the Yangtze River Economic Belt,Wuhan 430014,China
3.Hubei Key Laboratory of Rare Resource Plants in Three Gorges Reservoir Area,Yichang,Hubei 443000,China
Objective To enhance the risk assessment of the dynamic instability process of bank slopes under complex hydrological boundary conditions, a multi-factor joint probability-physical coupling analysis framework is proposed. Methods Using rainfall intensity (I), rainfall duration (D), and reservoir water-level fluctuation rate (R) as core triggering factors, a joint distribution of hydrological factors was established based on a trivariate Copula function. This was coupled with an unsaturated seepage-stability finite element model, and a critical triggering boundary function (critical rainfall pattern curve, CRPC) was proposed to achieve quantitative mapping from hydrological scenarios to instability responses. Considering the vegetation-drainage synergistic effect, a joint probability assessment of slope instability was achieved. Results The trivariate Clayton Copula (θ=10.213) demonstrated the best performance in the goodness-of-fit and correlation tests, effectively characterizing the nonlinear dependencies among the hydrological factors. Model retrospective validation showed that the error between the predicted and observed instability time was only 0.5 hours. The standardized distance from the event point to the CRPC was 0.08, the Brier score was 0.12, and the area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC-AUC) reached 0.87, demonstrating strong discriminatory power. The synergistic vegetation-drainage protection significantly reduced instability risk, decreasing the single-event instability probability by approximately 4.7% and the annual instability probability by 36.3%, outperforming individual measures. Conclusion The constructed trivariate Copula-physical coupling framework can reveal the nonlinear correlations among multiple hydrological factors and their influence on the slope's mechanical response. The validation results indicate that the framework possesses good reliability in reproducing the instability timeline and identifying risks, providing a quantitative basis for the landslide risk prediction, early warning, and ecological-engineering protection optimization in reservoir areas.
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