Recent advances in landslide investigation: Issues and perspectives

This special issue of Geomorphology includes 14 papers dealing with landslides selected from two conferences of the International Association of Geomorphologists (IAG): the Regional Conference held in Brasov, Romania, in September 2008 and the Seventh International Conference celebrated in Melbourne, Australia, in July 2009. The Regional Conference, under the theme “Landslides, floods and global environmental change in mountain regions”, was organized by Prof. Dan Bălteanu (Institute of Geography of the Romanian Academy) and his collaborators in a classic landslide area, the Carpathian Mountains. The participation reached 150 delegates from 30 countries. The programme of this meeting included 12 sessions with 116 contributions, 49 of which are related to landslides. This issue includes 8 papers out of the 11 selected presentations. The rest of the articles are derived from the “Hillslopes and Mass Movements” session of the Seventh International Conference on Geomorphology, organized by the Australian and New Zealand Geomorphology Group (ANZGG) under the leadership of Prof. Brian Finlayson (Monash University, Australia). Participation in this major event reached 648 delegates from 50 countries and the programme included 37 theme sessions. A total of 6 papers were selected from the 46 contributions presented at the “Hillslopes and Mass Movements” session convened by professors Mike Crozier (Victoria University, New Zealand) and Mauro Soldati (University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy). This compilation of articles covers a wide geographical and thematic canvas, with a special flavour from Eastern Europe derived from the IAG Regional Conference held in Romania. The study areas include all the major continents with the exception of North America. Eight papers from Europe (Andorra, Czech Republic, Estonia, Poland, Romania, Spain and Switzerland) deal with a wide diversity of topics; magnitude and frequency relationships in the Pyrenees, paleoenvironmental record of landslide activity in the Carpathians, slope instability in glacialacustrine clays in the Estonian coastal plain, landslide characterization in the Bohemian Massif, susceptibility mapping in Romania, mapping and assessment of debris-flow sediment sources in the Swiss Alps, and shallow slides and trenching applied to large landslides in a reservoir in the Pyrenees. Two papers deal with a catastrophic rock slide-avalanche in Japan. There is a paper on the interaction between large damforming landslides and fluvial activity in the deepest valley in the world located in Nepal. An article from Venezuela documents very large landslides associated with the Boconó Fault in the Andes. A paper reviews blanket peat landslides in subantartic islands. Finally, one paper discusses the relative role played by climate change and human activity on landslide activity, with numerous examples from New Zealand.