Foreword

This volume collects papers representing the results of research performed under Task 4 of a project funded by the Italian Civil Defence Department in 2005, “INGV-DPC Project S2 – Assessing the seismogenic potential and the probability of strong earthquakes in Italy” (Slejko and Valensise 2005). The goal of this task was to characterize the behavior of a given set of Italian seismogenic sources, using the most updated results obtained from the project itself, and to assign each source a probability of generating a significant earthquake. Nine Research Units participated in the activities of S2-Task4 in the period 2005–2007, using different and sometimes even contradictory methods and techniques. All the teams were required to use common, fixed databases, in order to make their results comparable. This forced the authors to adopt input data as they became available before the end of the project.