The landslide geodatabase of the Messina Province: a tool in the civil protection emergency cycle

Landslide geo-databases including inventories and thematic data, are today fundamental tools for national and/or local authorities in susceptibility, hazard and risk management. A well organized landslide geo-database contains different kind 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. The Italian region is strongly affected by landslides phenomena which cause victims and relevant economic damages to buildings and infrastructures, 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 (morphology, land use, lithologies) and different triggering mechanisms (meteorological conditions, seismicity, active tectonics and volcanic activity). For this area, a geo-database was created including different monitoring techniques, comprising 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 geo-database 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, damages assessment, risk zonation) which today are constantly used by the Civil Protection authorities to manage the landslide hazard of the Messina Province.