Landslide Mapping in Austria

Landslides are a major natural hazard in hilly and mountainous regions of Austria. The delineation and characterisation of landslide hazard areas in the whole country using a harmonized approach is of the utmost importance to the implementation of risk reduction strategies, including also land use planning and mitigation measures, as suggested in the EU Thematic Strategy for Soil Protection. To this end, a study of landslide maps and ancillary data available mainly at national and regional (federal state) mapping organisations and research institutes in Austria has been carried out. The results show that, although not exhaustive, a great deal of information on landslides exists in Austria. Such information is mainly available in the form of landslide inventories and susceptibility maps, often making part of digital databases. These data are however widely spread in different administrations, mainly because of the federal structure of the country. Primarily as a result of this, these maps and databases show significant differences concerning the mapping approach used, landslide classification criteria, representation scale, legend and symbology, data format, etc. Accessibility to most of these data is at the moment restricted to public administrations, although there are currently initiatives to make them publicly accessible via webGIS. Finally, some recommendations to improve landslide risk management in the country are provided.JRC.H.7-Land management and natural hazard

Risk Mapping of Flood Hazards in New Member States

In 2003 the Joint Research Centre conducted a survey of mapping practices in eleven (11) new Member States (Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia) for eight (8) major natural and technological hazards such as floods, forest fires, storms, landslides, earthquakes, industrial installations, transport of dangerous goods and contaminated lands. This activity was funded as part of the project entitled "Management of Natural and Technological Risks". One fundamental project objective was to examine the existing situation in each of the surveyed countries, and compare different mapping methodologies in order to define guidelines for establishing compatible risk mapping systems, in particular multi-hazard risk mapping. This report describes the results of the flood section of the risk mapping activity. Responses to the survey provide important information about the current status of flood hazards and risk mapping in different countries and advantages and obstacles to developing a common methodology for multi-hazard risk mapping including this hazard in each country.JRC.G.7-Traceability and vulnerability assessmen

Risk Mapping of Landslides in New Member States

In 2003 the Joint Research Centre conducted a survey of mapping practices in eleven (11) new Member States (Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia) for eight (8) major natural and technological hazards such as floods, forest fires, storms, landslides, earthquakes, industrial installations, transport of dangerous goods and contaminated lands. This activity was funded as part of the project entitled ¿Management of Natural and Technological Risks¿. One fundamental project objective was to examine the existing situation in each of the surveyed countries, and compare different mapping approaches in order to define guidelines for establishing compatible risk mapping systems, in particular multi-hazard risk mapping. This report describes the results of the landslides section of the risk mapping activity. Responses to the survey provide important information about the current status of landslide hazards and risk mapping in different countries and advantages and obstacles to developing a common methodology for multi-hazard risk mapping including this hazard in each country.JRC.G.7-Traceability and vulnerability assessmen

Analysis of national and regional landslide inventories in Europe

A landslide inventory can be defined as a detailed register of the distribution and characteristics of past landslides in an area. Today most landslide inventories have the form of digital databases including landslide distribution maps and associated alphanumeric information for each landslide. While landslide inventories are of the utmost importance for land use planning and risk management through the generation of landslide zonation (susceptibility, hazard and risk) maps, landslide databases are thought to greatly differ from one country to another and often also within the same country. This hampers the generation of comparable, harmonised landslide zonation maps at national and continental scales, which is needed for policy and decision making at EU level as regarded for instance in the INSPIRE Directive and the Thematic Strategy for Soil Protection. In order to have a clear understanding of the landslide inventories available in Europe and their potential to produce landslide zonation maps as well as to draw recommendations to improve harmonisation and interoperability between landslide databases, we have surveyed 37 countries. In total, information has been collected and analysed for 24 national databases in 22 countries (Albania, Andorra, Austria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, France, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and UK) and 22 regional databases in 10 countries. At the moment, over 633,000 landslides are recorded in national databases, representing on average less than 50% of the estimated landslides occurred in these countries. The sample of regional databases included over 103,000 landslides, with an estimated completeness substantially higher than that of national databases, as more attention can be paid for data collection over smaller regions. Yet, both for national and regional coverage, the data collection methods only occasionally included advanced technologies such as remote sensing. With regard to the inventory maps of most databases, the analysis illustrates the high variability of scales (between 1:10 000 and 1:1 M for national inventories, and from 1:10 000 to 1:25 000 for regional inventories), landslide classification systems and representation symbology. It also shows the difficulties to precisely locate landslides referred to in historical documents only. In addition, information on landslide magnitude, geometrical characteristics and age reported in national and regional databases greatly differs, even within the same database, as it strongly depends on the objectives of the database, the data collection methods used, the resources employed and the remaining landslide expression. In particular, landslide initiation and/or reactivation dates are generally estimated in less than 25% of records, thus making hazard and hence risk assessment difficult. In most databases, scarce information on landslide impact (damage and casualties) further hinders risk assessment at regional and national scales. Estimated landslide activity, which is very relevant to early warning and emergency management, is only included in half of the national databases and restricted to part of the landslides registered. Moreover, the availability of this information is not substantially higher in regional databases than in national ones. Most landslide databases further included information on geo-environmental characteristics at the landslide site, which is very important for modelling landslide zoning. Although a number of national and regional agencies provide free web-GIS visualisation services, the potential of existing landslide databases is often not fully exploited as, in many cases, access by the general public and external researchers is restricted. Additionally... (for full extended abstract please see attached document)JRC.H.7-Climate Risk Managemen

Risk Mapping of Earthquakes in New Member States

In 2003 the Joint Research Centre conducted a survey of mapping practices in eleven (11) new Member States (Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia) for eight (8) major natural and technological hazards such as floods, forest fires, storms, landslides, earthquakes, industrial installations, transport of dangerous goods and contaminated lands. This activity was funded as part of the project entitled "Management of Natural and Technological Risks". One fundamental project objective was to examine the existing situation in each of the surveyed countries, and compare different mapping methodologies in order to define guidelines for establishing compatible risk mapping systems, in particular multi-hazard risk mapping. This report describes the results of the earthquake section of the risk mapping activity. Responses to the survey provide important information about the current status of earthquake hazards and risk mapping in different countries and advantages and obstacles to developing a common methodology for multi-hazard risk mapping including this hazard in each country.JRC.G.7-Traceability and vulnerability assessmen

Progress in Landslide Susceptibility Mapping over Europe Using Tier-Based Approaches

The European Thematic Strategy for Soil Protection aims, among other objectives, to ensure a sustainable use of soil. The legal instrument of the strategy, the proposed Framework Directive, suggests identifying priority areas of several soil threats including landslides using a coherent and compatible approach based on the use of common thematic data. In a first stage, this can be achieved through landslide susceptibility mapping using geographically nested, multi-step tiered approaches, where areas identified as of high susceptibility by a first, synoptic-scale Tier (Tier 1) can then be further assessed and mapped at larger scale by successive Tiers. In order to identify areas prone to landslides at European scale (Tier 1), a number of thematic terrain and environmental data sets already available for the whole of Europe can be used as input for a continental scale susceptibility model. However, since no coherent landslide inventory data is available at the moment over the whole continent, qualitative heuristic zonation approaches are proposed. For Tier 1 a preliminary, simplified model has been developed. It consists of an equally weighting combination of a reduced, continent-wide common dataset of landslide conditioning factors including soil parent material, slope angle and land cover, to derive a landslide susceptibility index using raster mapping units consisting of 1 x 1 km pixels. A preliminary European-wide susceptibility map has thus been produced at 1:1 Million scale, since this is compatible with that of the datasets used. The map has been validated by means of a ratio of effectiveness using samples from landslide inventories in Italy, Austria, Hungary and United Kingdom. Although not differentiated for specific geomorphological environments or specific landslide types, the experimental model reveals a relatively good performance in many European regions at a 1:1 Million scale. An additional Tier 1 susceptibility map at the same scale and using the same or equivalent thematic data as for the one above has been generated for six French departments using a heuristic, weighting-based multi-criteria evaluation model applied also to raster-cell mapping units. In this experiment, thematic data class weights have been differentiated for two stratification areas, namely mountains and plains, and four main landslide types. Separate susceptibility maps for each landslide type and a combined map for all types have been produced. Results have been validated using BRGM's BDMvT landslide inventory. Unlike Tier 1, Tier 2 assessment requires landslide inventory data and additional thematic data on conditioning factors which may not be available for all European countries. For the Tier 2, a nation-wide quantitative landslide susceptibility assessment has been performed for Italy by applying a statistical model. In this assessment, multivariate analysis was applied using bedrock, soil and climate data together with a number of derivatives from SRTM90 DEM. In addition, separate datasets from a historical landslide inventory were used for model training and validation respectively. The mapping units selected were based on administrative boundaries (municipalities). The performance of this nation-wide, quantitative susceptibility assessment has been evaluated using multi-temporal landslide inventory data. Finally, model limitations for Tier 1 are discussed, and recommendations for enhanced Tier 1 and Tier 2 models including additional thematic data for conditioning factors are drawn. This project is part of the collaborative research carried out within the European Landslide Expert Group coordinated by JRC in support to the EU Soil Thematic Strategy. It is also supported by the International Programme on Landslides of the International Consortium on Landslides.JRC.DDG.H.7-Land management and natural hazard

Landslide Ground Based Remote Sensing Monitoring: Formigal Case Study (Huesca, Spain)

Galahad is an ongoing Specific Targeted Research Project developed within the EU 6th Framework Programme ¿ Priority 1.1.6.3. The objective is to retrieve, through the use of improved GB-SAR and TLS technologies, field parameters that can be used in prediction algorithms of landslides, avalanches and glaciers related hazards. The landslide study area is located in the ski resort of Formigal, central Pyrenees (province of Huesca, Spain). The excavation of a parking area in the summer of 2004 reactivated a complex paleolandslide creating new sliding surfaces. The movement extends over an area of 0.25 km2 and experienced displacements as large as 0.5 cm/day during the period 2004¿2005. Stabilization engineering solutions were carried out reducing maximum observed displacement to 0.2 cm/day at the end of 2005. Within Galahad performed activities consisted in the collection of data on the landslide useful for its detailed characterization and the execution of a series of site measurement campaigns with GB-SAR, TLS and Differential GPS (D-GPS). The monitoring activities started in May 2006 completing a series of four campaigns with Total Station and D-GPS, a continuous two month data acquisition with GB-SAR and several TLS scans during two different periods from three points of view over the landslide. In this paper data obtained by GB-SAR and TLS are compared with D-GPS data, and a good agreement has been found between data sets. The project is still in progress and new site measurement campaigns with GB-SAR, TLS and D-GPS in 2007 will provide further insight into landslide forecasting models.JRC.H.7-Land management and natural hazard

The State of Soil in Europe : A contribution of the JRC to the European Environment Agency’s Environment State and Outlook Report— SOER 2010

This report presents a pan-European perspective on the state soil in Europe in light of available data held within the European Soil Data Centre (ESDAC) and the research activities within the Joint Research Centre’s Soil Action. Managed by the JRC on behalf of EU institutions, the ESDAC operates as a focal point for pan-European data and information on soil. The core of this report was prepared as the Soil Assessment (EEA, 2010f) of the ‘Environment — state and outlook 2010 Report’, generally referred to as the SOER 2010. Coordinated by the European Environment Agency, the SOER series is aimed primarily at policymakers, in Europe and beyond, involved with framing and implementing policies that could support environmental improvements in Europe. The information also helps European citizens to better understand, care for and improve Europe's environment. The soil assessment was one of a set of 13 Europe-wide thematic assessments of key environmental themes and the only one coordinated by the JRC. The initial contribution from the JRC to the SOER exercise has been updated with additional material that could not be included in the SOER due to space restrictions, together with supplementary information that was not available at the time of the publication of the original text. The report describes the knowledge and understanding of the state of soil in Europe and the main trends, outlook and policy responses for the key processes affecting soil resources in Europe. Unfortunately, our knowledge base on many of the key functions of soil that deliver vital environmental services and goods are still poorly developed. This aspect will be a key focus of the activities of the Soil Action for the next SOER, foreseen for 2015. A set of pertinent issues and facts from the assessment are presented in the Key Messages section that can be found at the start of this report. Much more information and data can be found that the web sites of the ESDAC (http://esdac.jrc.ec.europa.eu) or the JRC Soil Action (http://eusoils.jrc.ec.europa.eu). All SOER 2010 outputs are available on the SOER 2010 website: www.eea.europa.eu/soer.JRC.H.5-Land Resources Managemen

Guidelines for the selection of appropriate remote sensing technologies for landslide detection, monitoring and rapid mapping: the experience of the SafeLand European Project.

New earth observation satellites, innovative airborne platforms and sensors, high precision laser scanners, and enhanced ground-based geophysical investigation tools are a few examples of the increasing diversity of remote sensing technologies used in landslide analysis. The use of advanced sensors and analysis methods can help to significantly increase our understanding of potentially hazardous areas and helps to reduce associated risk. However, the choice of the optimal technology, analysis method and observation strategy requires careful considerations of the landslide process in the local and regional context, and the advantages and limitations of each technique. Guidelines for the selection of the most suitable remote sensing technologies according to different landslide types, displacement velocities, observational scales and risk management strategies have been proposed. The guidelines are meant to aid operational decision making, and include information such as spatial resolution and coverage, data and processing costs, and maturity of the method. The guidelines target scientists and end-users in charge of risk management, from the detection to the monitoring and the rapid mapping of landslides. They are illustrated by recent innovative methodologies developed for the creation and updating of landslide inventory maps, for the construction of landslide deformation maps and for the quantification of hazard. The guidelines were compiled with contributions from experts on landslide remote sensing from 13 European institutions coming from 8 different countries. This work is presented within the framework of the SafeLand project funded by the European Commission’s FP7 Programme.JRC.H.7-Climate Risk Managemen

Search for dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks in √s = 13 TeV pp collisions with the ATLAS detector

A search for weakly interacting massive particle dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks is presented. Final states containing third-generation quarks and miss- ing transverse momentum are considered. The analysis uses 36.1 fb−1 of proton–proton collision data recorded by the ATLAS experiment at √s = 13 TeV in 2015 and 2016. No significant excess of events above the estimated backgrounds is observed. The results are in- terpreted in the framework of simplified models of spin-0 dark-matter mediators. For colour- neutral spin-0 mediators produced in association with top quarks and decaying into a pair of dark-matter particles, mediator masses below 50 GeV are excluded assuming a dark-matter candidate mass of 1 GeV and unitary couplings. For scalar and pseudoscalar mediators produced in association with bottom quarks, the search sets limits on the production cross- section of 300 times the predicted rate for mediators with masses between 10 and 50 GeV and assuming a dark-matter mass of 1 GeV and unitary coupling. Constraints on colour- charged scalar simplified models are also presented. Assuming a dark-matter particle mass of 35 GeV, mediator particles with mass below 1.1 TeV are excluded for couplings yielding a dark-matter relic density consistent with measurements