A multi-scale monitoring concept for landslide disaster mitigation

There has already been much research on how the kinematic and geodynamic behaviour of landslides can be predicted. However, until now, there has been no decisive breakthrough for a monitoring and evaluation system combined with an alert system. Therefore an interdisciplinary international project OASYS (Integrated Optimization of Landslide Alert Systems) was commenced to progress research in this area. The members of the project, supported by the European Union, believe a multidisciplinary integration of different methods has potential for substantial progress in natural hazards management. This project proposes a new method consisting of three different steps: 1. Detection of boundary lines of potential landslides based on large scale information. 2. Detection of "taking-off-domains" and permanent local scale monitoring of these regions with high sensitivity geotechnical measurement methods. 3. Knowledge-based derivation of real time information regarding actual risks to support alert systems. Following the methodology of the OASYS project, a mathematical method for the detection of taking off-domains and the concept of a knowledge-based alert system is described in this paper.