Abstract: Northern Fujian Province is a shallow landslide disaster area, where exists thick residual colluvium, loose soil structure and strong man-made surface activities, the main factors of inducing different scale landslides are different intensities of rainfall infiltration after a heavy rainstorm. From the view of landslide prevention, this paper uses double-loop infiltration method to research the effect of different vegetation types on surface soil infiltration, analyzes the mechanism of vegetation changing the soil infiltration rate, and simulates the process of infiltration using Horton model. The results show that vegetation will increase soil infiltration capacity, the infiltration capacity of bamboos is stronger than cedar forest, herbaceous plants can effectively reduce the rate of soil infiltration. It will result in the upper soil storing water and induce landslide if the infiltration of landslide surface soil is too high while the soil infiltration in lower stratum is low rate.

Key words: heavy rainfall , landslide , soil infiltration , vegetation type