ARAS: A Web-Based Landslide Susceptibility and Hazard Mapping System

Abstract

As in the case throughout the world, landslides in Turkey have accounted for significant amount of economic losses and caused damage to properties as well as the environment and inhabitants. For example, considering the last 70 years’ landslide records in Turkey, it was revealed that more than 60,000 people were affected due to landslides. Thus, in order to minimize the undesired landslide consequences, some measures and initiatives had to be taken. Particularly in the last 10 years, many projects have been initiated by the governmental agencies in Turkey. Of these, a web-based landslide susceptibility and hazard mapping system project, namely Disaster and Risk Reduction System (ARAS), has been initiated in 2016. The most important objective of ARAS is to establish a spatial decision support and analysis system to reduce the mass movement risk for mitigation efforts using today’s technologies and data processing techniques. In this study, it was aimed at introducing ARAS and its applications on producing landslide susceptibility and hazard maps in a web-based platform. For this purpose, whole stages of ARAS in its current version were explained and landslide susceptibility and hazard maps of Kastamonu city, located in Middle Black Sea region of Turkey, were produced for this study. In ARAS, risk assessment stage is an ongoing process at the moment, and will be completed in a few years. When completed, decision-makers, planners and local authorities will benefit from the advantages of ARAS, which will provide significant gains for sustainable risk management in Turkey.KeywordsLandslideSusceptibilityHazardWeb-based mapping