Urban Seismic Networks: A Worldwide Review

Abstract

Seismic networks in urban areas today represent key infrastructure to better address the tasks of earthquake preparation and mitigation in the pre-event phase, and are an important knowledge tool supporting disaster risk management during seismic crises and post-disaster recovery. In the last fifteen years, a decrease in instrumentation costs and the development of new low-cost devices have enhanced the deployment of several monitoring and experimental networks worldwide. This paper conducts a review of scientific work that refer to the deployment of Urban Seismic Networks (USN) in order to define the current state of the art. We collected a list of more than one hundred USNs worldwide that were operative within the period from 1994–2023. For each USN, we report the locations and objectives along with information about the timing, coverage, geometry, and technical characteristics (sensors and transmission). By reviewing all these aspects, this paper offers important insights to provide guidelines for new implementations, bearing in mind that the interest in monitoring urban areas is expected to continue to increase in the near future driven by population growth in urbanized areas.