Terrain visibility impact on the preparation of landslide inventories: a practical example in Darjeeling district (India)

Abstract

Landslide inventories are used for multiple purposes including landscape characterisation and monitoring, and landslide susceptibility, hazard and risk evaluation. Their quality and completeness can depend on the data and the methods with which they were produced. In this work we evaluate the effects of a variable visibility of the territory to map on the spatial distribution of the information collected in different landslide inventories prepared using different approaches in a study area. The method first classifies the territory in areas with different visibility levels from the paths (roads) used to map landslides and then estimates the landslide density reported in the inventories into the different visibility classes. Our results show that (1) the density of the information is strongly related to the visibility in inventories obtained through fieldwork, technical reports and/or newspapers, where landslides are under-sampled in low-visibility areas; and (2) the inventories obtained by photo interpretation of images suffer from a marked under-representation of small landslides close to roads or infrastructures. We maintain that the proposed procedure can be useful to evaluate the quality and completeness of landslide inventories and then properly orient their use.