USING CITIZEN SCIENCE TO GROW A GLOBAL LANDSLIDE CATALOG

Landslides occur in every country in the world, killing thousands of people each year and causing billions of dollars in property damage. However, the ability to actively monitor where and when they are happening is extremely limited, with very few open catalogs in the world that document these hazards. A prototype landslide reporting system has been developed that provides access to the Global Landslide Catalog (GLC), a rainfall-triggered landslide database based on media reports, online disaster databases, and other sources that has been compiled by scientists and interns at NASA GSFC since 2007. The current website (http://ojo-streamer.herokuapp.com/) displays the GLC data and allows visitors to make edits and new entries to the database as well as search and download data. While functional, the current interfaces need improvements before it can be fully realized as a useful tool. Citizen scientists are poised to provide contributions to this global hazard in a way that is impossible from a single monitoring entity and may be overlooked due to various reasons. Having a larger inventory of landslides will be game changing for a multitude of applications, including: better defining landslide triggering relationships, informing emergency responders of events in an affected area, making the public more aware of the pervasiveness of this hazard, and serving as a critical calibration and validation tool for researchers. This work presents a conceptual framework that seeks to expand the global catalog of landslide events through citizen science participation and engagement across a range of different agencies and partners. This work will also present findings from the existing global landslide catalog and outline some of the challenges associated with amassing a catalog of this nature.