Search results for " Landslide"
showing 10 items of 53 documents
Implications of terrain resolution on modeling rainfall-triggered landslides using a TIN- based model
2021
Abstract This study employs a distributed eco-hydrological-landslide model, the tRIBS-VEGGIE-Landslide, to evaluate the influence of terrain resolution on the hydro-geomorphological processes involved in slope stability analysis. The model implements a Triangulated Irregular Network (TIN) to describe the topography starting from a grid-DEM. Five grid-DEM resolutions of the case study basin, i.e., 10, 20, 30 and 70 m, are used to derive the corresponding TINs. The results show that using irregular meshes reduces the loss of accuracy with coarser resolutions in the derived slope distribution in comparison to slope distributions estimated from the original grid-based DEM. From a hydrological p…
Analysis of Hydrological and Landslide Hazards at Castellammare Del Golfo (Northern Sicily)
2014
Catastrophic floods or mass movements occur all too often owing to small streams overflowing their banks or to slope instabilities whose evolution has a more or less tragic impact on people and property; these events are the consequence of a poor understanding of the dynamics of geomorphological processes and of the laws governing them. This paper is focused on the case study of Castellammare del Golfo, a town in the province of Trapani. The study analysed the geological risk due to the geomorphology of the area and to the urban sprawl that it has experienced in the past decades. Geomorphological processes have a strategic role to play in spatial planning and management instruments and in t…
Investigating the Effects of Cell Size in Statistical Landslide Susceptibility Modelling for Different Landslide Typologies: A Test in Central–Northe…
2023
Optimally sizing grid cells is a relevant research issue in landslide susceptibility evaluation. In fact, the size of the adopted mapping units influences several aspects spanning from statistical (the number of positive/negative cases and prevalence and resolution/precision trade-off) and purely geomorphological (the representativeness of the mapping units and the diagnostic areas) to cartographic (the suitability of the obtained prediction images for the final users) topics. In this paper, the results of landslide susceptibility modelling in a 343 km2 catchment for three different types of landslides (rotational/translational slides, slope flows and local flows) using different pixel-size…
Investigating Limits in Exploiting Assembled Landslide Inventories for Calibrating Regional Susceptibility Models: A Test in Volcanic Areas of El Sal…
2022
This research is focused on the evaluation of the reliability of regional landslide susceptibility models obtained by exploiting inhomogeneous (for quality, resolution and/or triggering related type and intensity) collected inventories for calibration. At a large-scale glance, merging more inventories can result in well-performing models hiding potential strong predictive deficiencies. An example of the limits that such kinds of models can display is given by a landslide susceptibility study, which was carried out for a large sector of the coastal area of El Salvador, where an apparently well-performing regional model (AUC = 0.87) was obtained by regressing a dataset through multivariate ad…
Optimal slope units partitioning in landslide susceptibility mapping
2020
In landslide susceptibility modeling, the selection of the mapping units is a very relevant topic both in terms of geomorphological adequacy and suitability of the models and final maps. In this paper, a test to integrate pixels and slope units is presented. MARS (Multivariate Adaptive Regression Splines) modeling was applied to assess landslide susceptibility based on a 12 predictors and a 1608 cases database. A pixel-based model was prepared and the scores zoned into 10 different types of slope units, obtained by differently combining two half-basin (HB) and four landform classification (LCL) coverages. The predictive performance of the 10 models were then compared to select the best perf…
Modeling the hydrological and mechanical effect of roots on shallow landslides
2016
This study proposes a new methodology for estimating the additional shear strength (or cohesion) exerted by vegetation roots on slope stability analysis within a coupled hydrological-stability model. The mechanical root cohesion is estimated within a Fiber Bundle Model framework that allows for the evaluation of the root strength as a function of stress-strain relationships of populations of fibers. The use of such model requires the knowledge of the root architecture. A branching topology model based on Leonardo's rule is developed, providing an estimation of the amount of roots and the distribution of diameters with depth. The proposed methodology has been implemented into an existing dis…
Parameter Uncertainty in Shallow Rainfall-triggered Landslide Modeling at Basin Scale: A Probabilistic Approach
2014
Abstract This study proposes a methodology to account for the uncertainty of hydrological and mechanical parameters in coupled distributed hydrological-stability models for shallow landslide assessment. A probabilistic approach was implemented in an existing eco-hydrological and landslide model by randomizing soil cohesion, friction angle and soil retention parameters. The model estimates the probability of failure through an assumed theoretical Factor of Safety (FS) distribution, conditioned on soil moisture content. The time-dependent and spatially distributed FS statistics are approximated by the First Order Second Moment (FOSM) method. The model was applied to the Rio Mameyes Basin, loc…
Strategies investigation in using artificial neural network for landslide susceptibility mapping: application to a Sicilian catchment
2013
Susceptibility assessment of areas prone to landsliding remains one of the most useful approaches in landslide hazard analysis. The key point of such analysis is the correlation between the physical phenomenon and its triggering factors based on past observations. Many methods have been developed in the scientific literature to capture and model this correlation, usually within a geographic information system (GIS) framework. Among these, the use of neural networks, in particular the multi-layer perceptron (MLP) networks, has provided successful results. A successful application of the MLP method to a basin area requires the definition of different model strategies, such as the sample selec…
Physically-based and distributed approach to analyze rainfall-triggered landslides at watershed scale
2011
Abstract Landslides are a serious threat to life and property throughout the world. The causes of landslides are various since multiple dynamic processes are involved in driving slope failures. One of these causes is prolonged rainfall, which affects slope stability in different ways. Water infiltrating in a hillslope may cause a rise of the piezometric surface, which, in turn, involves an increase of the pore water pressure and a decrease of the soil shear resistance. For this reason, knowledge of spatio-temporal dynamics of soil water content, infiltration processes and groundwater dynamics, is of considerable importance in the understanding and prediction of landslides dynamics. In this …
One-Dimensional Transient Analysis of Rainfall Infiltration in Unsaturated Volcanic Ash
2015
The paper presents a one-dimensional hydro-mechanical analysis of rainfall infiltration in a loose volcanic ash and the utilisation of a factor of safety for the implementation of an early-warning system. Three different rainy seasons with different rainfall patterns were analysed . The analysis aims to understand the influence of the antecedent rainfall on the wetting front, the pore-water pressures and the factor of safety. The analysis was carried out in the context of a Master project of the first author at the Laboratory for Soil Mechanics of EPFL.