PS-driven inventory of town-damaging landslides in the Benevento, Avellino and Salerno Provinces, southern Italy

Abstract

ABSTRACT The Apennine provinces of Campania Region (southern Italy), Benevento, Avellino and Salerno, are known for their ‘unstable towns’ suffering periodic damage from landslides. Their identification and mapping are very challenging tasks, since boundary mapping under urban settlements is not always possible without time-consuming field analysis of building damage and/or expensive mid-term diffuse ground-surface deformation monitoring. To overcome this problem, an inventory of town-damaging landslides, guided by available Permanent Scatterers (PS) ground-deformation data, was prepared. It provides an updated tool suitable to guide future land planning and historical site restoration in the Apennine provinces of Campania Region. Our fourteen Map Sheets show active and local reactivation of suspended/dormant landslides. Overall, 356 landslides were identified, amongst which 162 were identified as flows, 101 as slides, 1 as a spreads and 92 as complex landslides. To supplement our maps, a simplified distribution analysis based on major landslide morphometric characteristics was completed.