Review of landslide inventories for Nepal between 2010 and 2021 reveals data gaps in global landslide hotspot

Type of content
Journal Article
Thesis discipline
Degree name
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Language
en
Date
2024
Authors
Harvey EL
Kincey ME
Rosser NJ
Gadtaula A
Collins E
Densmore AL
Dunant A
Oven KJ
Arrell K
Basyal GK
Abstract

A review of landslide inventories provides an essential assessment of the state of knowledge around landslide hazard and can guide the focus of future studies. This is especially true in Nepal, which is highly prone to landslides, but lacks a comprehensive overview of landslide occurrence nationally. Here, we compile a database of 117 landslide inventories for Nepal released between 2010 and 2021. We review how these existing inventories shape our understanding of landsliding in Nepal and discuss how future research efforts could mitigate current challenges. We find that 40% of the country was only manually mapped once across the study period, and, crucially, these areas did not always correspond with areas of low landslide susceptibility. Instead, existing landslide inventories typically focus on specific areas, such as the region affected by the 2015 Gorkha Earthquake and major highway corridors. We also extrapolated the individual inventory characteristics from within this unique database to infer a national-scale areal density of 0.05 landslides per kmjats:sup2</jats:sup>, equating to 6000 landslides across the country. This extrapolated value provides a baseline for future national-scale studies, especially for inventories created through automated mapping approaches. Our review highlights the importance of expanding the footprint of landslide inventories in Nepal to include regions with low mapping coverage and the need for inventories to be openly available, with clear protocols to enable inter-comparison. Whilst our review has focused on Nepal, these findings are likely to be relevant in other landslide-prone countries and our recommendations are intended to be applicable elsewhere.

Description
Citation
Harvey EL, Kincey ME, Rosser NJ, Gadtaula A, Collins E, Densmore AL, Dunant A, Oven KJ, Arrell K, Basyal GK, Dhital MR, Robinson TR, Van Wyk de Vries M, Paudyal S, Pujara DS, Shrestha R (2024). Review of landslide inventories for Nepal between 2010 and 2021 reveals data gaps in global landslide hotspot. Natural Hazards.
Keywords
Landslide inventories, Landslide hazard, Nepal
Ngā upoko tukutuku/Māori subject headings
ANZSRC fields of research
37 - Earth sciences::3709 - Physical geography and environmental geoscience::370903 - Natural hazards
37 - Earth sciences::3709 - Physical geography and environmental geoscience::370901 - Geomorphology and earth surface processes
37 - Earth sciences::3709 - Physical geography and environmental geoscience::370906 - Regolith and landscape evolution
Rights
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.