Landslides across the USA: occurrence, susceptibility, and data limitations
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Benjamin B. Mirus I Eric S. Jones I Rex L. Baum I Jonathan W. Godt I Stephen Slaughter I Matthew M. Crawford I Jeremy Lancaster I Thomas Stanley I Dalia B. Kirschbaum I William J. Burns I Robert G. Schmitt I Kassandra O. Lindsey I Kevin M. McCoy
Landslides across the USA: occurrence, susceptibility, and data limitations Abstract Detailed information about landslide occurrence is the foundation for advancing process understanding, susceptibility mapping, and risk reduction. Despite the recent revolution in digital elevation data and remote sensing technologies, landslide mapping remains resource intensive. Consequently, a modern, comprehensive map of landslide occurrence across the United States (USA) has not been compiled. As a first step toward this goal, we present a national-scale compilation of existing, publicly available landslide inventories. This geodatabase can be downloaded in its entirety or viewed through an online, searchable map, with parsimonious attributes and direct links to the contributing sources with additional details. The mapped spatial pattern and concentration of landslides are consistent with prior characterization of susceptibility within the conterminous USA, with some notable exceptions on the West Coast. Although the database is evolving and known to be incomplete in many regions, it confirms that landslides do occur across the country, thus highlighting the importance of our national-scale assessment. The map illustrates regions where high-quality mapping has occurred and, in contrast, where additional resources could improve confidence in landslide characterization. For example, borders between states and other jurisdictions are quite apparent, indicating the variation in approaches to data collection by different agencies and disparity between the resources dedicated to landslide characterization. Further investigations are needed to better assess susceptibility and to determine whether regions with high relief and steep topography, but without mapped landslides, require further landslide inventory mapping. Overall, this map provides a new resource for accessing information about known landslides across the USA. Keywords Landslide mapping . Inventories . Susceptibility . Incidence . National map . United States Landslide occurrence, impacts, and assessments in the USA In the USA, landslides are a geologic hazard known to occur in every state. Some estimates suggest that they cause an average of 25–50 fatalities each year and contribute to billions of US dollars in economic losses annually (National Research Council 1985; Schuster 1996). Landslide fatalities vary considerably from year to year, and more recent estimates report that 93 landslide-related fatalities occurred within the USA between 2004 and 2016 (Froude and Petley 2018). Two notable events include a large, deep-seated landslide near Oso, WA, in March 2014, which resulted in 43 fatalities (Iverson et al. 2015; Collins and Reid 2019), and widespread debris flows in Montecito, CA, in January 2018, which resulted in 23 fatal
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