Analysis of hazard potential of landslides using geo-information system

Natural slopes as well as man-made slopes can pose risk to human life and infrastructure with regard to its long-term stability. The still growing urbanization pressure and the infrastructure expansion, which is important from a world-wide as well as an economic point of view, means that more and more, from a geotechnical point of view, unsuitable areas are being opened up for development. Such areas are often insufficiently protected against natural disasters such as landslides.

Landslides cause world-wide enormous destruction and hence high costs for mitigation and rehabilitation. In Germany the destruction due to landslides amounts to few hundred million Euro every year. Even though, there is no spatial information about the hazard potential of areas at risk of sliding. In this paper an analysis method for risk of sliding is presented that can be integrated in a “Technical Information System” and visualized in scale 1:25000 to 1:10000 by Geographic Information System (GIS). In doing so and considering the boundary conditions, relevant criteria are combined, overlaid and merged by using rule-based algorithms. GIS-based overlay functions have been used extensively for the production of landslide hazard maps [1]. Further assessment can be performed by integrating data mining methods.

The first step in the workflow is to identify safe areas and eliminate these areas from further analysis. As results of this process, areas prone to sliding risk are focused on for further analysis. An example from Germany is used to demonstrate the process.