Open image in new windowGenerating Application-Orientated Susceptibility Maps for Shallow Landslides Understandable to the General Public

Abstract

Landslide susceptibility maps, ranked either in numeric susceptibility classes or in descriptive hazard classes, are widespread among the scientific community. While landslide susceptibility experts are familiar with these classifications, for laymen or experts from other fields the classes are often less understandable and of less practical use. To overcome this challenge, we present in this article susceptibility maps for specific issues and users as well as the communication of the map content in a practical and understandable way. These application-oriented maps are based on scenarios of change of forest distribution and precipitation amount. The maps were calculated for the well-studied region of Gasen-Haslau in Styria/Austria, where a high-quality process dataset of 413 shallow landslides of a disaster event of August 2005 is available. According to the applied forest scenarios, the maps show e.g. where afforestation should be performed or deforestation should be avoided. According to the applied scenarios for the precipitation amount, the maps show e.g. where always low or high hazard-relevant process-potential can be found, regardless of the precipitation amount within a heavy rainfall event. We consider these maps as good and meaningful tools to communicate hazard assessment to general public and planning authorities in a non-academic and practical way. Hence they could also support experts of other fields better in putting their work into practice than conventional susceptibility maps do.