USA: How LiDAR helps in preventing and mitigating landslides
[...]
Geologists have increasingly started using LiDAR as a way to predict and study landslides. One of the crucial steps that is being taken by governments and scientists is the integration of airborne LiDAR as a crucial component in disaster mitigation efforts. Data gathered by LiDAR provides useful insights into geographical risk zones and helps in the identification of areas vulnerable to landslides. The main advantage of LiDAR over other aerial imagery is that with the help of LiDAR we can easily see beyond thickets of vegetation and focus on otherwise hidden details like slope angle, the extent of deformation and the magnitude of erosion.
In landslide assessment, surveillance and thorough monitoring, LiDAR is a valuable tool. But what further increases its utility and makes it of utmost importance is the fact that LiDAR can help us pinpoint areas where landslides could take place.
[...]
One of the main reasons why landslides occur is due to change in land features like slope, terrain roughness, stream power metrics and its elevation. These changes can be either due to natural factors like wildfires or man-made factors like indiscriminate deforestation, haphazard constructions.
[...]
High-resolution LiDAR modeling reveals subtle surface features that are simply undetectable via aerial photographs or field observation. This helps with mitigation planning, landscape modeling and thus saving the lives of millions of people as well as the infrastructure.
LiDAR also increases the efficiency of observation multiple times. In 2009, a study of how many landslides had been mapped before the state of Oregthe on in US started using LiDAR found around 10,000 mapped landslides. Using LiDAR, there was more than a fourfold increase of landslides in that same database, and it covered only a small area of the state.
[...]