After the publication of my first-author paper of Landslide Reporter's first year of citizen science data, Kasha Patel featured our project in a NASA Earth Observatory "Image of the Day" and interviewed our team. An excerpt from the article is below.
Image: Landslides from January 1 - December 31, 2018, by Lauren Dauphin made using data from Juang et al. (2019)
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The map above shows citizen science reports compared to items being entered into NASA’s Global Landslide Catalog. The red points show European landslides reported by citizen scientists since March 2018, while yellow points represent reports added to the news-driven Global Landslide Catalog since 2007. Citizen scientist data is more prevalent over hilly regions of Germany and the Alps, where landslide susceptibility is high but reports from the NASA Global Landslide Catalog are sparse.
According to the study, 49 citizen scientists contributed 162 landslide events in the first 13 months of the project. The data came from sources in 11 languages and from in-person observations.
“It is clear from the 162 data points that citizen scientists are filling in knowledge gaps that we had previously,” said Caroline Juang, lead author of the paper and doctoral candidate in Department of Earth and Environmental Science at Columbia University.
With data from the Landslide Reporter and the Global Landslide Catalog, COOLR is now the largest publicly available global landslide database and should significantly improve NASA’s landslide hazard model, the Landslide Hazard Assessment for Situational Awareness. Past analysis by Kirschbaum and her colleague Thomas Stanley showed that landslides are likely to occur in areas that have previously experienced activity. Having more accurate accounts of such activity on the ground is critical to assessing future impacts. Satellite products such as topography, land cover change and precipitation can also help to further understand the distribution of potential landslide activity from space.
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Read the full article on NASA's Earth Observatory.