CitSci as a New Approach for Landslide Researches

Abstract

Landslide is a commonly and frequently observed disaster on the Earth both spatially and temporally. The landslide researches mainly aim at characterizing and understanding this process and the earth dynamics, and predicting their occurrence based on triggering factors, their spatial and temporal dimension, thus assess the hazard potential; and estimating the risks which they cause on the economy, environment, and lives. Due to the great variety and amount of data included in this field, it is crucial to form complete landslide databases both at regional level and worldwide. The main aim of this assessment is to bring new insights to the landslide data acquisition aspect by different users. The need of accurate and reliable geodata collection by ordinary people is inevitable for ensuring sufficient spatiotemporal density and distribution, thus forming extensive landslide databases and simulating and planning the future. With the developments in geoinformation technologies, as well as the transforming power of information and communication technologies (ICT) on the society, it became possible to use the citizen science (CitSci) methods in many scientific fields. It has as well enormous potential in landslide data collection, validation and interpretation, and thus contribute to landslide researches. In this review, the uncertainties lead by missing data and affecting quality of regional landslide assessments are discussed, and the potential of citizen science in landslide researches is described. The role of volunteer data is portrayed with specific examples from the literature. The levels of citizen contribution are depicted accordingly.