FraneItalia: a catalog of recent Italian landslides

Michele Calvello,Gaetano Pecoraro

doi:10.1186/s40677-018-0105-5

Abstract

BackgroundIn Italy landslides are widespread natural phenomena causing a significant number of fatalities and huge economic losses throughout the country every year. Information on the spatial and temporal distribution of landslides at national scale is critical for developing landslide susceptibility, hazard and risk maps, as well as, more generally, for decision making in landslide risk management.DescriptionThe paper presents, after a brief review on global and national landslide databases, a new geo-referenced catalog of recent landslides affecting the Italian territory. The catalog, called Franeitalia, includes both fatal landslide events and events that did not produce physical harm to people. It has been developed consulting online news sources from 2010 onwards. The following seven steps have been performed to define and populate the catalog: i) selection of news sources; ii) identification of effective search keywords; iii) collection of relevant news articles; iv) identification of landslide categories; v) definition of catalog fields; vi) information mining from news articles; vii) geo-referencing of the events. Landslide events are classified considering two numerosity categories and three consequence categories. The numerosity categories are: single landslide events (SLE), for records only reporting one landslide; and areal landslide events (ALE), for records referring to multiple landslides triggered by the same cause in the same geographic area. Both SLEs and ALEs are divided in three consequence classes according to whether the event produced victims and/or missing people (C1, very severe), injured persons and/or evacuations (C2, severe), or did not cause any physical harm to people (C3, minor). Information on the landslide events collected in the catalog always includes: data on the location of the event, day of occurrence of the landslide (s), source (s) of information, and number of landslides in case of areal events. Additional information may include: onset and duration of the landslide event, landslide characteristics, phase of activity, details on the consequences.ConclusionsReports and statistics on the landslides included in the catalog are presented highlighting: the main figures of the landslide inventory, currently spanning from the 2010 to 2017 and including 8931 landslides; and time-dependent national and regional trends, with a focus on the consequences induced by the events. The paper also compares and discusses the figures in relation to other catalogs reporting recent landslides that occurred in the Italian territory.

Highlights

In Italy landslides are widespread natural phenomena causing a significant number of fatalities and huge economic losses throughout the country every year
Reports and statistics on the landslides included in the catalog are presented highlighting: the main figures of the landslide inventory, currently spanning from the 2010 to 2017 and including 8931 landslides; and timedependent national and regional trends, with a focus on the consequences induced by the events
The temporal uncertainty related to the occurrence of the landslide events is specified by means of two confidence descriptors, named: certain (Td1), when the news sources report at least the day of the event; estimation (Td2), when the operator has to interpret the news reports to assign a date to the event

Summary

Introduction

In Italy landslides are widespread natural phenomena causing a significant number of fatalities and huge economic losses throughout the country every year. The numerosity categories are: single landslide events (SLE), for records only reporting one landslide; and areal landslide events (ALE), for records referring to multiple landslides triggered by the same cause in the same geographic area Both SLEs and ALEs are divided in three consequence classes according to whether the event produced victims and/or missing people (C1, very severe), injured persons and/or evacuations (C2, severe), or did not cause any physical harm to people (C3, minor). Calvello and Pecoraro Geoenvironmental Disasters (2018) 5:13 characteristics (Kirschbaum et al 2015): i) developing maps highlighting historical landslides over local or regional scales; ii) recording single catastrophic triggering events; iii) compiling information from a combination of newspaper reports, published articles, aerial photographs and other sources, typically as point-based databases at national, international or global scale. An overview of natural hazard databases that use newspapers and other documentary evidence is provided by Raška et al (2014)

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