Dominica Landslide Inventory Map

This is part of the Caribbean Handbook on Risk Information Management (www.charim.net) funded by World Bank under the Caribbean Risk Information Program with a grant from the ACP-EU Natural Disaster Risk Reduction Program.  A consortium led by the Faculty ITC of the University of Twente was responsible for conducting capacity-building workshops, generating training materials, and creating hazard maps to expand the capabilities within participating infrastructure and spatial planning ministries to use hazard and risk information for decision-making. We generated a new database of disaster events for Dominica, making use of many different sources. This is the most complete inventory to our knowledge. It is quite clear from this database that the landslide reporting became more frequent in recent years, and less information on landslides is available when going back in time, whereas the data on tropical storms and hurricanes seems to be much more constant over time. The underreporting of landslides is a big problem in trying to evaluate landslide frequency/magnitude relations. We also compiled all available landslide occurrence data from different sources. We had to digitize some of the older inventories which were only available in paper format. Eventually we compiled landslide inventories for 1987, 1990, 2007 and we generated a completely new landslide inventory using multi-temporal visual image interpretation, and generated an extensive landslide database for Dominica. The resulting landslide database contains 980 landslides from 1987, 183 from 1990, 161 from 2007 and 986 new landslides were mapped representing the situation in 2014. We also compiled landslide inventories along the road network for five recent events from the maintenance records of the Ministry of Public Works. These contained 27 landslides for September 2009, 20 for October 2010, 84 for September 2011, 74 for November 2011 and 44 for April 2013. After completing the first version of the report a large number of landslides were triggered by tropical storm Erika in August 2015. We decided to include these data in this second version of the report, and also update the landslide inventory and susceptibility map. UNOSAT mapped a total of 1554 new landslides as polygons using semi-automatic image classification and BRGM mapped 89 landslides as points in the field.