A CitSci app for landslide data collection

Depending on the increase in the world population and climate changes, the number of disasters have increased gradually. To cope with natural hazards, comprehensive disaster management strategies must be developed and implemented. Among the natural hazards, landslides are one of the most harmful and they cause serious economic losses and human deaths throughout the world. To reduce these losses, comprehensive regional landslide susceptibility and hazard assessments must be performed and the mechanism of landslides must be understood clearly. If a landslide inventory database is inaccurate and incomplete both spatially and temporally, assessment of regional landslide susceptibility and hazard includes more or less uncertainties. Consequently, new approaches are needed to reduce or even to eliminate the uncertainties. For this reason, the purposes of the present study are to describe the potential role of Citizen Science (CitSci) in landslide researches and to present a simple and user-friendly mobile app for the collection of the essential data from landslides. It is expected that the use of CitSci in landslide researches would increase and help greatly for the provision of comprehensive data. In addition, the spatial distribution of the data to be collected may be correlated with the human population and the settlement density.