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Landslide geodatabases, including inventories and thematic data, today are fundamental tools for national and/or local authorities in susceptibility, hazard and risk management. A well organized landslide geo-database contains different kinds of data such as past information (landslide inventory maps), ancillary data and updated remote sensing (space-borne and ground based) data, which can be integrated in order to produce landslide susceptibility maps, updated landslide inventory maps and hazard and risk assessment maps. Italy is strongly affected by landslide phenomena which cause victims and significant economic damage to buildings and infrastructure, loss of productive soils and pasture lands. In particular, the Messina Province (southern Italy) represents an area where landslides are recurrent and characterized by high magnitude, due to several predisposing factors (e.g. morphology, land use, lithologies) and different triggering mechanisms (meteorological conditions, seismicity, active tectonics and volcanic activity). For this area, a geodatabase was created by using different monitoring techniques, including remote sensing (e.g. SAR satellite ERS1/2, ENVISAT, RADARSAT-1, TerraSAR-X, COSMO-SkyMed) data, and in situ measurements (e.g. GBInSAR, damage assessment). In this paper a complete landslide geodatabase of the Messina Province, designed following the requirements of the local and national Civil Protection authorities, is presented. This geo-database was used to produce maps (e.g. susceptibility, ground deformation velocities, damage assessment, risk zonation) which today are constantly used by the Civil Protection authorities to manage the landslide hazard of the Messina Province. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research in Umbria, Italy, has shown that landslide susceptibility is controlled by a process called path-dependency, which describes how past landslides control the locations of future landslides. To date, landslide path-dependency has only been characterised in Italy. This raises the question of whether this process occurs in other geomorphic settings, and thus whether path-dependency should be more universally included in landslide susceptibility assessments. Therefore, the main aim of this paper is to investigate and quantify landslide path dependency in the Nepal Himalaya. This is achieved by applying several path dependent metrics to three monsoon-triggered landslide inventories for the central-eastern Nepal Himalaya. These inventories were developed at two different spatial and temporal resolutions. As such, we aim not just to quantify landslide path-dependency, but also to assess whether path dependency characteristics are resolution-dependent. We find strong evidence that landslide path dependency is occurring in Nepal, with all three inventories having more overlap between past and new landslides than expected from a random distribution, and a tentative observation that the expected degree of overlap between landslides decreases with time. Finally, whilst path-dependency is observable across both of the investigated inventory resolutions, we find that the rates and magnitudes of the quantified path dependent metrics are sensitive to inventory length, study region size and the size/type of landslides mapped. Overall, our results corroborate the path-dependency observations from Italy, confirming that this process does occur in other geomorphic settings, and thus suggesting that path-dependency should be explicitly and universally considered in landslide susceptibility approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]