ABSTRACT
The annual number of sinkhole occurrences has significantly increased in urban areas worldwide, including Tehran city in Iran. A sinkhole is a hole in the ground stemmed from the collapse of the surface layer. Sinkhole-contributing factors can be grouped into two main categories: “human-made” and “natural.” This paper presents a sinkhole susceptibility map for Tehran city. The development of the susceptibility map involved the following steps: (1) Prepa-ration of the sinkhole inventory map, (2) Identification of sinkhole contributing factors, (3) Sink-hole susceptibility mapping by weighting the contributing factors, (4) Development of sinkhole susceptibility model using Frequency Ratio (FR) with 70% of sinkhole database, selected ran-domly, (5) Validation of the developed susceptibility maps with sinkhole database. The paper concludes that the presented methodology could be used to develop susceptibility sinkhole maps for cities facing similar challenge.
