资源环境科技发展态势分析平台

Although most landslides are precipitation-triggered, a number of other complex conditions simultaneously predispose any given slope to failure, with the impact of urbanization posing particular scientific challenges. We use panel regression with fixed effects – which controls for observed and unobserved time-variant and time-invariant influences – to quantify the effect of precipitation accumulation on landslide concentration across the Pacific Coast region of the United States. We find that landslide hazard is most sensitive to variations in precipitation in urbanized areas. This finding is robust across one-day, ten-day, and thirty-day periods of precipitation accumulation, among individual Pacific Coast states, and when the analysis is confined to the San Francisco Bay Area (a sub-region with both urban and rural areas). Our results corroborate existing hypotheses that urbanization increases landslide hazard, while demonstrating the importance of considering interactions with urbanization when predicting landslide hazard in the current climate, and under climate change scenarios.