Heavy rainfall triggering shallow landslides: A susceptibility assessment by a GIS-approach in a Ligurian Apennine catchment (Italy)

In recent decades, the Entella River basin (eastern Liguria) has been affected by several rainfall events that induced widespread shallow landslides and earth flows on the slopes; roads, buildings, structures and infrastructure suffered extensive damage due to the instability processes. In this paper, a GIS-based approach for analyzing and assessing a simplified landslide susceptibility in the Entella River catchment is presented. Starting from landslide information mainly provided from newspaper articles and unpublished reports from municipal archives, we performed a series of comparative analyses using a set of thematic maps to assess the influence of predisposing natural and anthropic factors. By evaluating the statistical distribution of landslides in different categories, we assigned weighted values to each parameter, according to their influence on the instability processes. A simplified, reproducible, but effective approach to assess landslide susceptibility in the study area was performed by combining all predisposing factors. The resulting scores in proneness to slope instability classes may be used to generate a simplified landslides susceptibility map of the catchment area which would be easy to regularly update every time a rainfall event that is able to trigger shallow landslides occurs; this would provide a useful tool for local authorities and decision makers for identifying areas which could potentially be affected by instability processes, and would help in determining the most suitable measures in land-planning and landslide risk management.