Software for quantifying shallow landslide hazards to transportation infrastructure under changing climate and forest management

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Critical infrastructure in upland landscapes can be damaged by landslides and debris flows, and managing and mitigating the risks posed to this infrastructure is a key challenge for infrastructure owners. In addition, landslides and debris flows do not respect ownership boundaries, and third party landowners can find themselves liable for mass movements originating from their land, whereas infrastructure owners have to manage hazards from beyond their holdings. In addition, transport owners and maintaining agents must be able to plan on works to be delivered at the right time and in the right place. Planning efficient spending has a number of challenges, including persistent uncertainty in how changes in climate and land use affect future landslide susceptibility and limited capability to make effective use of high resolution digital datasets (e.g. LiDAR surveys) to model landslide scenarios.This project will develop software for producing landslide hazard maps at regional scales incorporating the highest resolution topographic and land use data. It builds on previous hazard research at the University of Edinburgh and the British Geological Survey, and is built to work in a mulitcore, supercomputing environment--the software can handle big data in the form of very high resolution LiDAR surveys that provide information on slopes at the sub-metre scale: the scale at which mass movements and the hydrology that drive them operate. In addition, the software will be designed to provide scenario modelling. In particular, one of the major drivers in changes in landslide hazard is changing root cohesion from different vegetation patterns along transport corridors. The project will assimilate forestry data from Forest Research so that we can investigate the planting and harvesting schedule that minimised landslide risk, and also determine the time at which transport corridors are most threatened by landsliding. The ultimate objective of the project is to provide a software tool that land owners, infrastructure owners and maintaining agents can use to better plan mitigation and spending strategies.