Environmental Earth Sciences - Call for Papers

Landslides in a Changing Environment

Guest Editors: Mihai Ciprian Mărgărint, Marta Jurchescu

Landslides are widespread natural geomorphological processes that shape the Earth surface, especially in mountainous and hilly regions. Their occurrence is related to many static and dynamic factors and represents a permanent threat to humans, their properties and environment. During the last decades, several landslide triggers (especially climate and human pressure) recorded a series of changes that are reflected in an increased impact of landslides, affecting more and more humans on all continents. The understanding of past events, present-day distribution and the prediction of future events are milestones for scientists aiming to decipher the mechanisms in which landslides occur and develop. Future global and regional climate changes overlapping with constantly rising pressures through the anthropized spaces will lead to increased exposures and vulnerabilities to landslide risk. In this way, new complex challenges emerge and need to be tackled and shared within the scientific world as well as the practitioners and decision makers, in order to develop adaptive measures and strategies for disaster risk reduction. At the same time, recent technological advancements constantly enriched the methodology and the themes of landslide research.  New tools, technologies and methods became available, revolutionizing the wide spectrum of issues related to the understanding and prediction of landslides: from integrated data provided by instrumental monitoring networks and process-based modeling, that focus on physical laws of slope instability at the local scale, to new Earth Observation technologies and increasingly complex computational modeling of landslide hazard and risk at regional, national, continental and global scales. 

In this unprecedented complex context of both challenges and opportunities for landslides studies, the current special issue welcomes high-quality scientific papers from all over the world to contribute novel knowledge in a wide range of landslide research topics:

• innovative tools, approaches and technologies in landslide detection, mapping, monitoring and modeling
• the mechanics, dynamics and causes of different landslide types by field and laboratory studies
• landslide historical and event-based inventories
• paleo-landslides and reconstruction of their environmental conditions
• process-based models in landslide prediction
• climate change and landslide behavior responses
• extreme meteorological events and landslides
• landslide early warning systems (LEWSs)
• the role of anthropogenic factors and land use changes on landslide activity
• the place of landslides in the concatenated multi-hazard succession
• quantitative approaches in landslide susceptibility, hazard and risk assessments
• evaluation of uncertainties affecting landslide prediction and forecasting
• landslide risk management and adaptation strategies
• landslide risk perception, communication and policies