Landslide Hazard Risk and Vulnerability Monitoring—GIS Based Approach

Recent technological strides have ushered in a transformative era for disaster assessment, monitoring, mitigation, and management. Amid this progress, Geographic Information System (GIS) has emerged as a pivotal tool, assuming a pivotal role in monitoring landslide hazards, risks, and vulnerabilities. Through the fusion of diverse spatial data sources—encompassing topography, land cover, rainfall, geology, and infrastructure details—GIS enables comprehensive data integration and interpretation. This integration bears multifaceted applications, spanning Landslide Hazard and Risk Assessment, Vulnerability Monitoring and mapping, Real-time Information Collection, Early Warning Systems, Decision Support, Management, and Community Awareness. With GIS as a cornerstone, a wealth of benefits unfurl—from bolstering landslide hazard, risk, and vulnerability monitoring to seamlessly incorporating this intelligence into land-use planning and infrastructure development. Particularly significant in Himalayan regions, GIS empowers stakeholders with actionable insights, guiding judicious choices that foster resilience and safety. This chapter provides an introduction to landslide risk and vulnerability and also navigates through the need and methodologies for the preparation of an inventory of historical landslide records, provides an understanding of various factors, their importance, and methodologies of evaluation of these factors as driving factors for the occurrence of landslide. This chapter also provides insight into statistical and machine learning technologies that have been used for landslide susceptibility mapping, provides knowledge about implications and prospective avenues of GIS technologies primed for landslide monitoring, and elucidates the prospective applicability of landslide hazard risk and vulnerability monitoring.