Landslides investigations from geoinformatics perspective: quality, challenges, and recommendations

Abstract

Understanding and assessing the landslides is immensely important to scientists and policy-makers alike. Remote sensing conventional methods and modelling approaches in geographical information system (GIS) tend to be limited to authentic quality and spatial coverage. This study aims to identify challenges and quality of landslides assessment based on remotely sensed data by the mean of existing works of the literature and practices we attempted in the Zagros and Alborz Mountains in Iran and the red rock shield Lake, China. Remote sensing data for landslides investigations require a high-resolution digital elevation model (DEM) from either aerial photography, satellite images, airborne laser scanning (ALS) or terrestrial Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) derived in order to enable a reliable and valid output performance. This paper presents weaknesses and strengths of the existing remote sensing techniques in the last decades and further provides recommendations for a reliable approach to the future landslide studies. Also, this study estimates the operational use of state-of-the-art technologies (i.e. unmanned airborne vehicle (UAV)) for landslides assessment in the near future that is a realistic ambition if we can continue to build on recent achievements. However, this paper does not deliver a detailed methodology of a DEM generation from the remote sensing approach for landslides assessment.

Relationship between man-made environment and slope stability: the case of 2014 rainfall events in the terraced landscape of the Liguria region (northwestern Italy)

“…Due to the great extent and the complexity of the involved areas, we prevalently operated by exploiting LiDAR data. This procedure is confirmed by several authors who analysed ground surface processes by means of high-resolution DTMs (Glenn et al 2006;Ardizzone et al 2007;Haneberg et al 2009;Tarolli 2014;Pirasteh and Li 2016), also in forested areas (Eeckhaut et al 2007;Razak et al 2013;Chen et al 2014) and for large territories (Eeckhaut et al 2007). We employed a visual analysis methodology combining the highresolution DTM and orthoimages.…”

An offline–online Web-GIS Android application for fast data acquisition of landslide hazard and risk

“…satellite imagery and aerial photographs) together with field verification using GPS (Soeters and van Westen, 1996). There are some examples of different methods using RS, lidar, and comparisons of inventory maps (Galli et al, 2008;Pirasteh and Li, 2016). Landslide inventory data, hazard factors, and elements at risk (Fig.…”

A New Recursive Filtering Method of Terrestrial Laser Scanning Data to Preserve Ground Surface Information in Steep-Slope Areas

“…Although TLS data has been accepted as a major data source in recent years, a point cloud acquired by the LiDAR system usually includes unnecessary objects such as vegetation [20]. In this case, an accurate DTM can be generated after removing non-ground object points from the point cloud.…”