FraneItalia: a catalog of recent Italian landslides

The paper presents, after a brief review on global and national landslide databases, a new geo-referenced catalog of recent landslides affecting the Italian territory. The catalog, called Franeitalia, includes both fatal landslide events and events that did not produce physical harm to people. It has been developed consulting online news sources from 2010 onwards. The following seven steps have been performed to define and populate the catalog: i) selection of news sources; ii) identification of effective search keywords; iii) collection of relevant news articles; iv) identification of landslide categories; v) definition of catalog fields; vi) information mining from news articles; vii) geo-referencing of the events.

Landslide events are classified considering two numerosity categories and three consequence categories. The numerosity categories are: single landslide events (SLE), for records only reporting one landslide; and areal landslide events (ALE), for records referring to multiple landslides triggered by the same cause in the same geographic area. Both SLEs and ALEs are divided in three consequence classes according to whether the event produced victims and/or missing people (C1, very severe), injured persons and/or evacuations (C2, severe), or did not cause any physical harm to people (C3, minor). Information on the landslide events collected in the catalog always includes: data on the location of the event, day of occurrence of the landslide (s), source (s) of information, and number of landslides in case of areal events. Additional information may include: onset and duration of the landslide event, landslide characteristics, phase of activity, details on the consequences.