Martin Klose

Landslide impacts in Germany: A historical and socioeconomic perspective

Landslide impacts on infrastructure and society in the Federal Republic of Germany are associated with damage costs of about US

Estimation of Direct Landslide Costs in Industrialized Countries: Challenges, Concepts, and Case Study

300 million on annual average. Despite the large overall losses due to widespread landslide activity, there is a lack of historical impact assessments, not just for Germany’s low mountain areas but those of entire Central Europe as well. This paper is a collection of three case studies from Germany that seek a better understanding of landslide impacts and their economic relevance at local and regional level. The first case study investigates damage types and mitigation measures at a representative landslide site in ways that support to gain insight into historical hazard interactions with land use practices. This case history is followed by a case study dealing with fiscal cost impacts of landslide damages for an example city and the highway system of the Lower Saxon Uplands, NW Germany. In addition to a cost-burden analysis for affected public budgets, an overview of the principles of disaster financing in landslide practice is given. The third case study is focused on the conflicts of urban development in hazard areas, with an economic approach to balancing safety and public welfare interests. Each case study is based on historical data sets extracted from Germany’s national landslide database. This paper presents three different case studies that in combination are a first step towards assessing landslide impacts in integrated perspective.

Landslide Database for the Federal Republic of Germany: A Tool for Analysis of Mass Movement Processes

This paper presents a short summary of the challenges and concepts in previous landslide loss studies and introduces a methodological framework for the estimation of direct landslide costs in industrialized countries. A case study of landslide losses for federal roads in the Lower Saxon Uplands (NW Germany) exemplifies the application of this methodology in a regional setting.

Synthesis—Towards Integrated Assessment of Landslide Risk

This contribution deals with an initiative to develop a national landslide database for the Federal Republic of Germany. The paper highlights the structure and contents of this database and outlines its system architecture that underlies the current database transformation. With this background, the paper examines the database potential for research on landslide disaster impacts and hazard mitigation.

Landslide Susceptibility Modeling on Regional Scales: The Case of Lower Saxony, NW Germany

Landslides in terms of their causes or triggers and the risk they entail on society show most often a natural geomorphic and human dimension (e.g., Sidle et al. 1985; Alexander 1989; Nadim et al. 2011; Sect. 1.1). These two dimensions are closely interconnected as a result of widespread urbanization and the global dominance of cultivated landscapes (e.g., Vaclavik et al. 2013; United Nations 2014). A large part of terrestrial landslides are thus occurring in a spatial setting where human activity is not just vulnerable to landslides but is also controlling their physical processes to some extent. Fundamental understanding of landslide risk requires therefore knowledge on how people are contributing to this risk by their own land use practices.

Landslide Databases—State of Research and the Case of Germany

This paper presents a regional landslide susceptibility model for the Federal State of Lower Saxony, NW Germany. A modified Information Value approach has been developed, which uses bivariate statistics to identify the spatial probability of landslide occurrence. To optimize the approach for regional applications, several modifications have been made: landslide pixel mapping is replaced by point representation and the weighting function uses landslide densities based on attribute areal coverage. The input data of the landslide susceptibility model include a spatial inventory of about 900 landslides and different data sets of geomorphometry, lithology, and land use.

Landslide cost modeling for transportation infrastructures: a methodological approach

Landslide databases are valuable sources of information for research on landslides, not only in terms of their causes, types, and processes (e.g., Pelletier et al. 1997; Guzzetti et al. 2009; Rossi et al. 2010; Tonini et al. 2013; Hurst et al. 2013), but also the impacts and risks associated with them (e.g., Guzzetti et al. 2003; Hilker et al. 2009; Van Den Eeckhaut et al. 2010; Klose et al. 2014a). A landslide database, often also referred to as landslide inventory, is a systematic collection of information on past landslides (Hervas 2013). Besides some few event-based inventories, for example, those for earthquakes (e.g., Gorum et al. 2011) or rainfall events (e.g., Tsai et al. 2010), most landslide databases today are of historical nature, recording landslides at local to global scale over time (e.g., Malamud et al. 2004; Galli et al. 2008; Guzzetti et al. 2012).