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Landslides recurrently impact the Italian territory, producing huge economic losses and casualties. Because of this, there is a large demand for monitoring tools to support landslide management strategies. Among the variety of remote sensing techniques, Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) has become one of the most widely applied for landslide studies. This work reviews a variety of InSAR-related applications for landslide studies in Italy. More than 250 papers were analyzed in this review. The first application dates back to 1999. The average production of InSAR-related papers for landslide studies is around 12 per year, with a peak of 37 papers in 2015. Almost 70% of the papers are written by authors in academia. InSAR is used (i) for landslide back analysis (3% of the papers); (ii) for landslide characterization (40% of the papers); (iii) as input for landslide models (7% of the papers); (iv) to update landslide inventories (15% of the papers); (v) for landslide mapping (32% of the papers), and (vi) for monitoring (3% of the papers). Sixty-eight percent of the authors validated the satellite results with ground information or other remote sensing data. Although well-known limitations exist, this bibliographic overview confirms that InSAR is a consolidated tool for many landslide-related applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Persistent Scatterer Interferometry (PSI) is a consolidated tool for detecting and monitoring ground surface displacements. The availability of satellite data with free access policy and high monitoring capabilities (in terms of resolution and acquisition frequency) is increasing. Moreover, the first continental displacement map of Europe will be freely available in quarter one 2022 by the latest Copernicus Service, the European Ground Motion Service (EGMS). The EGMS will provide ground displacement maps, updated every year, delivering valuable information to a wide range of users, such as public or governmental institutions, industry, academia, and citizens. This vast amount of information needs semi-automatic tools and methodologies to derive user-oriented products that can be easily used by land use and urban planning decision-makers, who are often unfamiliar with PSI. This work proposes a semi-automatic procedure to identify damage prone areas in urban environments from wide-area PSI displacement maps. The proposed method identifies the most significant Active Deformation Areas (ADAs) to calculate three products based on the displacement intensity gradient: the Gradient Intensity Map, the Gradient Vectors and Time Series, and the Potential Damage Map. These products allow identifying buildings and urban structures exposed to potential damage, which could be followed by a more detailed building-based vulnerability and risk assessment. The methodology has been applied to an area of the province of Granada (Andalucía, Spain) but it can be applied to any other urban environment where PSI displacement maps are available. To demonstrate the advantages and limitations of the proposed method, results are discussed in five coastal resorts (Cerro Gordo, Punta de la Mona, Marina del Este, Alfa Mar, and Monte de los Almendros), strongly affected by slope movements. The methodology allowed to derive 175 ADAs from about 200,000 measurement points. About 15% of the resulting area has been found to correspond to high or very high gradient intensity class, and 192 out of 633 buildings have been identified to be prone to moderate or high potential damage. A damage prediction test has been realized through Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) analysis, based on a damage inventory map derived from field surveys. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the methodology to localize damaged or potentially damaged buildings, substantially reducing the time of analysis. • A step towards the automatic exploitation of satellite interferometric (InSAR) data. • Automatic exploitation of PSI to support a multi-scale geohazard risk management. • A methodology for the automatic exploitation of EGMS continental displacement maps. • Potential Damage Maps based on spatial gradients of velocity and angular distortion. • Regional scale detection of coastal landsides causing damages in Granada Region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]