“DID YOU SEE It?” A WEBSITE TO COLLECT REPORTS OF LANDSLIDE OCCURRENCE IN THE UNITED STATES FROM THE PUBLIC AND PRACTITIONERS

U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Landslide Hazards Program is developing an interactive website for public reporting of landslides patterned after the USGS Earthquake Program’s successful “Did you feel it?” website for collecting reports of felt earthquakes. The website is being developed to collect landslide information from across the United States, and its public introduction is planned in connection with an emergency Winter Storm Scenario planning exercise for landslides, floods, and coastal erosion resulting from severe winter storms. The April 2010 exercise is being organized by the USGS Southern California Multi-Hazards Project and its partners. The website has been designed to make it as easy as possible for the public and practitioners to provide observations that could be used to classify landslides, characterize any damage, and provide information on the location, timing, speed, and size of the landslides. Location information will be plotted in real time to show the spatial distribution of reported events. A module for sharing photographs of the landslides is also being planned and we are investigating available methods for receiving and storing the photographs in a secure and cost-effective manner. Information obtained from the website could be used by researchers to define and test rainfall warning thresholds, estimate landslide losses, enhance landslide inventory databases, and plan post-disaster response. Major challenges to the project include designing a questionnaire and interface for collecting scientifically meaningful data, creating a website that gives users something in return for their observations (to keep them coming back), motivating users to report on landslide events that are not located near their home or business, filtering spurious data, and distinguishing multiple reports of the same landslide. Over time, the website will be modified and enhanced based on user feedback as well as results of analyzing the data for accuracy and reliability. We have used published landslide report forms to design our questionnaire and improved it based on input from others. At the time of this writing, we are in the process of developing a test database and web form for the questionnaire and investigating graphical methods for locating landslides without addresses.