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The core of ecorisQ is made of its members. By joining ecorisQ you will expand your professional network and profit from transparent tools in the field of natural hazard risks. Being an ecorisQ member demonstrates that you are willing to increase the transparancy and reproducibility of natural hazard analyses and that you promote sustainable protection against natural hazards.
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New in SOSlope version 1.5.0 (November 2019)
- Changed TWI input to Contributing Area (CA)
- TWI calculated internally using sin(slope)
- Added new GIS outputs and renamed files for better readability
- Added one tree specie: Populus nigra (Black poplar)
New in SOSlope version 1.4.0 (April 2019):
- Added input for user-defined output directory name
- Added inputs for soil depth parameters (Depth_min, Depth_max, Slope_min,
Slope_max) for calculating soil depth as a function of slope using a linear
equation - Added checkbox for basal root reinforcement
- Added three new tree species: Ailanthus altissima (Tree of heaven, Ailanthus),
Quercus pubescens (Pubescent Oak), Thrychiocarpus fortunei (Chinese windmill
Palm) - Updated values for Pinus radiata
New in SOSlope version 1.3.9 (July 2018):
- Added new tree specie: Betula pendula (Birch)
- Added display of soil USCS parameters in drop-down menu
- Fixed bugs in some tree specie implementation
- Removed message log during run for increased speed performance
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EcorisQ organizes a SOSlope training course in the USA at the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, California, on the 7th of December 2019. In this course we will present an updated version of SOSlope and will use case studies to illustrate the use of the software for modeling shallow landslide hazards and for quantitative evaluation of soil bio-engineering measures. The participation is cost-free and limited to a total of 25 participants. The program can be found here. An additional course will be orgsanized on the 8th of December if there is a high demand. For registration please write an email to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
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Last thursday, the 26th of September 2019, the Working Party on the Management of Mountain Watersheds (WPMMW), a technical body under the umbrella of the European Forestry Commission (EFC), established in 1950, met in Innsbruck to discuss "Protective Functions of Forests in a Changing Climate". The meeting was organised by the Austrian Federal Ministry for Sustainability and Tourism, the Province of Tyrol and FAO. The program of the meeting can be found here. The main take home messages were:
- Forests reduce natural hazard risks, they do not provide 100% protection (the same accounts for human made structural measures)
- Forests should be an integral part of risk management strategies
- Legal frameworks for implementing protection forests are largely available / in force - it just has to be done and not only in the Alps
- Major challenges for protection forests are:
- regeneration of forests (ensuring establishment and growth of young trees that overtake the proecrive role of older ones in the future)
- climate change (i.e., changing regimes in insect outbreaks, pests and diseases, forest fires and windthrow, drought stress)
- manpower and financial resources to ensure long-term sustainable management
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As the seasons change so too it appears does the incidence of storms, landslides and floods that all too often accompany fall and spring weather.
September saw many events across the globe of landslides taking the lives of people from Wales, Uganda, Philippines and more. Similarly floods accompanying hurricanes, typhoons, cyclones and tropical storms battered coastal communities causing millions of dollars in damage in Mexico, the US and elsewhere with loss of life. Earthquakes were also not far from the news causing damage in Sulawesi in Indonesia in October and causing severe landslides in Palu. Mallorca in Spain felt the impacts of a very large flash flood and violent storms have lashed France in recent days. You can see more on Dave Petley’s Landslide Blog.
October also saw the release of the Special Report on Global Warming from the IPCC that governments approved a 1.5⁰C limit to global warming. Co-Chair of IPCC Working Group I, Panmao Zhai said “One of the key messages that comes out very strongly from this report is that we are already seeing the consequences of 1°C of global warming through more extreme weather, rising sea levels and diminishing Arctic sea ice, among other changes”.
Whatever the reason, climate change or just natural variation in the weather, natural hazards are here to stay, and will continue to disrupt the lives of people around the globe. The work of ecorisQ and its members as well as those in similar organisations becomes ever more important as society aims to understand, respond to, or manage these many natural hazards.
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This year, abundant rainfall triggered numerous shallow landslides in a protection forest area burnt in 2011, causing damages to infrastructures and the interruption of roads. The stand replacing fire caused the almost complete loss of root reinforcement that did contribute to slope stability within few years, as documented in Vergani et al. (2017). After such forest disturbance, models such as SOSlope can be used to localize critical unstable areas and to optimize the plan of measures to enhance the recovery of forest protection effectiveness. Recent studies have shown that such forest needs 40 to 80 years to recover their protection function, without influence of ungulates. In these cases, targeted measures can considerably reduce the time window of increased landslide probability.
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