{"id":962,"date":"2021-05-05T20:39:18","date_gmt":"2021-05-05T20:39:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/collegeofforestry\/?p=962"},"modified":"2021-05-07T16:26:42","modified_gmt":"2021-05-07T16:26:42","slug":"determining-landslide-risk-to-plan-and-protect","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/collegeofforestry\/2021\/05\/05\/determining-landslide-risk-to-plan-and-protect\/","title":{"rendered":"Determining landslide risk to plan and protect"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Landslides are a global hazard that take the lives of over ten thousand people a year and dramatically reshape our landscapes.

\u201cThe loss of lives is the most tragic consequence,\u201d says Ben Leshchinsky<\/a><\/strong>, Richardson Chair in Forestry and associate professor of geotechnical engineering. \u201cMore often, however, the impact of landslides is economic and related to the costs of repairs or mitigation or moving people as well as impacts to emergency access.\u201d

Leshchinsky studies various topics relating to geotechnical engineering, with a primary emphasis on landslides, slope stability, reinforced soil, and applying remote sensing techniques to assess geohazards.

Leshchinsky does some of his work in partnership with the Oregon Department of Transportation.

\u201cThey have lots of concerns about accessibility and emergency response, particularly following a big earthquake, rainstorm or change in climate,\u201d Leshchinsky says.

When most people think of a landslide, they think of a sudden, abrupt failure and slope or hillside collapse. While those types of landslides exist, some landslides move more like a glacier than an avalanche.

\u201cWe do quite a bit of work monitoring slow-moving failures,\u201d Leshchinsky says. \u201cUnderstanding if there\u2019s a pattern to their movement, like when they will move, how they will move, and how it might impact infrastructure. We also work to understand the risk or likelihood of an event.\u201d

Determining the risk is key to planning and protecting communities and infrastructure. To support that effort, Leshchinsky and colleagues developed an approach to take landslide inventories, analyze their failure mechanism, understand their mechanical properties and use this data for regional-scale landslide hazard, susceptibility and risk assessment. These tools advance how we can use landslide databases to predict landslide hazards, which is essential to planners, engineers and scientists.

\u201cThe problem we were seeing before creating our tools is that people develop these databases that were missing key pieces of information,\u201d Leshchinsky says. \u201cI could, for example, see trends and other data in the database, but was missing information like how to mitigate landslide impacts, or how to evaluate how likely it is that a slope will fail.\u201d

Leshchinsky is working with PhD student Nick Mathews<\/strong> to generate different potential landslide scenarios, like earthquakes or significant storm events, in the Oregon Coast Range to evaluate the susceptibility and vulnerability of infrastructure to damage or closures from landslides.

\u201cOne of the things I do is take inventories of landslides and back out information like shape, volume and strength to determine how slopes might fail,\u201d Mathews says. \u201cI also ask questions like does this location have \u2018weak\u2019 geology or \u2018strong\u2019 geology? I use those numbers to evaluate, in terms of forecast and predictive measures, to help determine what will fail next.\u201d

\u201cDocumenting past slope failures gives us an idea of what will happen in the future,\u201d Leshchinsky says.

Leshchinsky says we often associate landslides with human activities. While those can speed up or accelerate landslide activity, the fact is wherever there is a slope, there has likely been a landslide at some point in the past.

\u201cThese are natural processes connected to the environment, and they are the reasons our mountains, valleys and sea cliffs are the shape they are,\u201d Leshchinsky says. \u201cLandslides are the source of sediment and gravel that fish love to spawn in. They are one of the disturbances that work to produce a classic old-growth forest with a patchwork of vegetation and different types of trees.\u201d

Landslides serve a role in our environment that\u2019s not fully understood or appreciated. Leshchinsky says that while we know the basics of what drives landslides, there is incredible uncertainty in trying to predict where and when they will occur in the future.

\u201cI tell my students that people say space is the final frontier. I don\u2019t see it this way,\u201d Leshchinsky says. \u201cDown beneath our feet is the final frontier, and geological conditions we don\u2019t know or can\u2019t see often drive these landslides. Being able to take data from the surface and convert it to something meaningful from a perspective of understanding how things work is valuable worldwide.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A version of this story appeared in the Spring 2021 issue of <\/em>Focus on Forestry<\/a>, the alumni magazine of the Oregon State University College of Forestry.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Landslides are a global hazard that take the lives of over ten thousand people a year and dramatically reshape our landscapes. \u201cThe loss of lives is the most tragic consequence,\u201d says Ben Leshchinsky, Richardson Chair in Forestry and associate professor of geotechnical engineering. \u201cMore often, however, the impact of landslides is economic and related to… Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3455,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[110163,1292536],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-962","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-focus","category-research"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/collegeofforestry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/962","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/collegeofforestry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/collegeofforestry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/collegeofforestry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3455"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/collegeofforestry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=962"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/collegeofforestry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/962\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":982,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/collegeofforestry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/962\/revisions\/982"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/collegeofforestry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=962"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/collegeofforestry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=962"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/collegeofforestry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=962"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}