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[TwoBears]

What's the safest way to remove very large sections of land?  Just using d>h to channel cause cave-ins.  Same with using ramps.

[Urist McUristy]

attach a support with a remote lever to it, then activate it once its all detached but the lever.

[twilightdusk]

Yea, if the area you're clearing is uniform in shape, make the top layer supported by a support attached to a lever (pull the lever, goodbye support). If you then mine out the floor beneath that area so it's just floor with no walls, then when you collapse the top floor, it will crash through the rest of the floors, saving you the need to have multiple cave ins (Warning: this will generate a lot of dust. I take no responsibility for any death of dwarves or FPS as a result of this action.)

[NecroRebel]

If the area is actually intact prior to your attempt to remove it (as in, the wall beneath is still intact), you can just designate the whole thing for channeling. However, since you've referred to caveins, that probably isn't the case.

The safest way, then, is to designate one (ideally vertical) row for channeling at a time. This takes a long time to do, however, and a lot of attention on your part, and so isn't always ideal.

For multi-z-level spaces, the best way is to designate the whole space to be turned into up/down stairs, except for the bottom level which is turned only into up stairs. Then, designate the whole top layer for channeling. The dwarves will channel from below, standing on the up stairs there, while the floor above is supported by the staircase directly below it. As such, there will never be anywhere unsupported. Once the whole top level is gone, repeat for the next level down, then the next, until you get to the bottom, where you simply remove the up stairs.

That method also works for one-z-level spaces, of course, but is somewhat wasteful, since if you've got intact walls to put the staircases in you're in no danger of caveins anyway.

[AtomicPaperclip]

Ramps work fairly well as long as there is nothing to prevent the "floor" above from collapsing. Like trees. Trees will always cause a cave in if you dig ramps all the way around and through them. So chop down all trees first. Spontaneous growths are fun!