Abstract: Natural disasters such as landslide and soil erosion are severe in China. Therefore, effective evaluation of slope stability further provides the warning for local/regional soil erosion, which is essential to the precise prediction and effective prevention of these catastrophes. Many approaches have been proposed in assessing slope stability and landslide hazards in the literature, the commonly-used approaches include (1) field inspection using a checklist to identify sites susceptible to landslides; (2) projection of future patterns of instability from analysis of landslide inventories; (3) multivariate analysis of factors characterizing observed sites of slope instability; (4) stability ranking based on criteria such as slope, lithology, landform, or geologic structure; and (5) failure probability analysis based on slope stability models with stochastic hydrologic simulations. Each of these is valuable for certain applications. None, however, takes full advantage of the fact that debris flow source areas are, in general, strongly controlled by surface topography through shallow subsurface flow convergence, increased soil saturation, increased pore pressures and shear strength reduction. In this study, a distributed modeling scheme based on digital elevation model (DEM), takes advantage of geographic information system (GIS) and remote sensing information coupling with the Infinite Slope Stability Model to quantify topographic attributes related to slope instability and landsliding so as to mapping the hillslope stability entitled as SINMAP was introduced in detail, and its application to a 2431 km² watershed in Shanxi Province was conducted and tested with the discussion of the field observations. The experimental application indicated its good applicability and operational value in quantitative evaluation of surface stabilities in basin scale areas.