European Landslide Expert Group

The European Landslide Expert Group was created by the Institute for Environment and Sustainability of the JRC in 2007 to carry out collaborative research in support of European Union soil policy making concerning landslides.

Members

(the persons hereunder agreed to have their name and email listed on this ESDAC website)

  • José Chacón, University of Granada, Spain
  • Claire Dashwood, British Geological Survey (BGS), Keyworth, Nottingham, UK
  • Andreas Günther, Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources (BGR), Hannover, Germany
  • Javier Hervas, Panos Panagos (coordinator), Joint Research Centre (JRC), European Commission, Ispra, Italy
  • Peter Hobbs, British Geological Survey (BGS), Keyworth, Nottingham, UK
  • Jean-Philippe Malet, Institute of Physics of the Globe (CNRS-EOST), Strasbourg, France
  • Alessandro Pasuto, Research Institute for Hydrogeological Protection (CNR-IRPI), Padua, Italy
  • Eleftheria Poyiadji, Institute of Geology and Mineral Exploration of Greece (IGME), Acharnae, Greece
  • Paola Reichenbach, Research Institute for Hydrogeological Protection (CNR-IRPI), Perugia, Italy
  • Sebastiano Trevisani, IUAV University, Venice, Italy (formerly with the Research Institute for Hydrogeological Protection, CNR-IRPI, Padua, Italy)

Activities

The European Landslide Expert Group has produced guidelines for delineating areas at risk of landslides in Europe using harmonised approaches and common thematic datasets, as suggested by the EU Thematic Strategy for Soil Protection and the related Proposal for a Soil Framework Directive. Such approaches initially focus on landslide susceptibility mapping and are based on Tiers. These consist of hierarchically-ordered, geographically-nested approaches whereby areas identified as of high susceptibility to landslides in the initial, synoptic-scale Tier (Tier 1) are subsequently evaluated and mapped at higher resolution in successive Tiers.

The Group has additionally developed models for landslide susceptibility assessment at European scale (Tier 1) and national scales (Tier 1 and 2) using available landslide conditioning factor datasets and landslide inventory data. As a result, landslide susceptibility maps have been produced for Italy and France, as well as a first version of the European Landslide Susceptibility Map (ELSUS1000 v1), released on 15 February 2013, and a second version (ELSUS v2) on 12 February 2018 (see Data and Publications sections below).

Current work focuses on (1) evaluating the accuracy of ELSUS v2; (2) testing statistical approaches for landslide susceptibility assessment in selected areas of Europe where landslide inventory data are more complete; and (3) assessing landslide susceptibility at pan-European and national scales in selected countries separately for major landslide types. These activities are carried out in collaboration with some members of the European Centre on Geomorphological Hazards (CERG) and of EuroGeoSurveys’ Earth Observation and Geohazards Expert Group, as well as with other European landslide experts.

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Data

To get access to the new European Landslide Susceptibility Map ELSUS v2, including ancillary spatial datasets and metadata, please compile the Request form; instructions on how to download the data will then follow. 

Please note that ELSUS v2 shows larger geographical coverage, higher spatial resolution and higher prediction model performance than the former version ELSUS1000 v1. The latter has been removed from ESDAC following publication of ELSUS v2.


 

Publications

Meetings

A number of meetings and hands-on workshops have been held in Ispra (2), Hannover, Vienna, Berlin and Perugia, including two plenary meetings.

Contact Point

Javier Hervas, Panos Panagos

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