Abstract
The dating of past landslide events is one of the most crucial aspects of landslide research, leading to a better understanding of past landslide activity. Landslides can be extremely dangerous natural hazards, and thus, solving the relationships between their activity and climate variations is of high importance. For these purposes, data about past landslide activity are fundamental for such analyses. Various methods of landslide absolute dating exist, but the most precise approach that dates back several centuries is based on tree-ring analysis (dendrogeomorphology). Landslide movements can affect the growth of trees in response to specific growth disturbances. Although dendrogeomorphic methods are successfully used for dating other geomorphic processes, their use in landslide research is actually the most frequent. Dendrogeomorphic research on landslides is strongly influenced by general approaches of landslide signal extraction from tree-ring series of disturbed trees and by the type of landslide (varying by morphology, material and mechanism of movement). This study provides an overview of basic aspects of dendrogeomorphic research on landslides, and more specifically, it reviews basic tree-ring-based approaches of landslide dating. Presented review focuses on various landslide types and their effect on dendrogeomorphic dating. This review is built from the extensive database of all accessible dendrogeomorphic studies of landslides from 1893 to 2020. Moreover, recommendations for specific sampling and approach choice in individual landslide types are presented. Finally, limits of tree-ring-based approaches are presented, including provided proposals for further research.
Highlights
Dendrogeomorphic methods are generally meaningful and useful approaches for landslide dating, several limitations still exist that should be minimized during future research
Dendrogeomorphic methods have been frequently used for landslide research for more than a century, with a dynamic increase in the interest in these approaches during the last decade
The review of all accessible studies dealing with this problem discovered a surprising gap in the considering of specific landslide movement mechanism to character and intensity of tree growth responses
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. [19] noted the limitations of archival data (difficult comparison of data from different sources or impossible determination of exact locality) In such cases, methods of absolute dating can provide useful insight into past landslide activity. Dendrogeomorphic methods can provide data of past landslide activity ranging several hundred years in the past [24] with seasonal precision [25] Their principle is based on the ability of trees to record external disturbances in tree-ring series. Dendrogeomorphic methods are generally meaningful and useful approaches for landslide dating, several limitations still exist that should be minimized during future research (e.g., defining of optimal age structure of sampled trees, filtering of tree-ring signals coming from various landslide types, or defining the general sensitivity of trees to landslide movements). Based on the abovementioned aspects of dendrogeomorphic landslide dating, the aims of this paper are (i) to provide an overview of tree-ring-based methods for past landslide event dating, (ii) to review the effect of various methodical approaches on the results of landslide dating, (iii) to review the specific effects of various landslide types on tree-ring-based dating, and (iv) to provide an overview of limitations and research gaps and provide suggestions for solving these problems in future dendrogeomorphic research
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