Creating a Comprehensive Landslides Inventory Using Remote Sensing Techniques and Open Access Data

Landslides are natural disasters with a high socio-economic impact on human societies due to the considerable number of fatalities and the destruction of infrastructure that they cause. A comprehensive landslides inventory is vital for reducing this impact, as it can be used in landslide susceptibility studies for the identification of the most critical to landslide subregions of an area, for the evaluation of the landslide precipitation activation thresholds, and subsequently for the determination of the most suitable precautionary measures. Nowadays, remote sensing techniques are widely used by scientists for creating landslides inventories, as they can be rapidly applied to identify landslides along with their spatial characteristics. Nevertheless, besides these characteristics, a comprehensive inventory must also include the time of their activation and the factors that led to their activation. These elements can be quite difficult to specify, especially in areas where official landslide data do not exist, such as in countries that do not have a published national landslides inventory. The objective of this research study is to provide a framework for the creation of a comprehensive landslides inventory by combining open access or publicly available data with remote-sensing data and techniques. The Chania regional unit in the western part of Crete Island, Greece, was selected as the study area. Our study presents how a complete landslides inventory, consisting of more than 150 landslides, was established based on differential interferometry synthetic aperture radar (DInSAR) techniques and open access or publicly available data. This framework can significantly contribute to scientific research on landslide susceptibility in countries that lack a comprehensive landslides inventory. Moreover, it highlights the potential of remote-sensing techniques and open access data in improving our understanding of landslide activation mechanism.