Assessing landslide risk with the help of GIS
Landslides have claimed lives and caused considerable property damage in the mountainous regions of Europe. The Energy, Environment and Sustainable Development (EESD) Programme funds research that aims to improve management of these and other natural disasters. EESD funding enabled Vienna Consulting Engineers (VCE) to gather a team of dedicated scientists from nine organisations to form the OASYS project consortium. The group applied its collective expertise and experience to the task of landslide risk management. Technology proved an important enabler as a Geographic Information System (GIS) was used as a platform for the display and analysis of data from different sources. Determination of landslide risk relies on a statistical model that takes a number of different factors into account. This allows the characterisation of slopes for which no historical landslide data is available. VCE and its OASYS partners further enhanced the model by including details about landslide generation mechanisms. This facilitated the identification of the parameters that have the greatest predictive power for new landslides. In conclusion, the OASYS prototype represents a significant step forward in landslide risk management.
