The devastating magnitude-7.8 earthquake that struck Nepal in April caused surprisingly few landslides, researchers say — confirming the early impressions of scientists who raced to map collapsed terrain in the quake’s aftermath. However, there is still hot debate over just how severe the event’s impacts were.

The main aim of this paper is to test economic benefits of landslide prevention measures vs. post-event emergency actions. To this end, detailed- and large-scale analyses were performed in a training area located in the northeastern Italian pre-Alps that was hit by an exceptional rainfall event occurred in November 2010. On the detailed scale, a landslide reactivated after 2010 event was investigated.

Current models to explain regional-scale landslide events are not able to account for the possible effects of the legacy of previous earthquakes, which have triggered landslides in the past and are known to drive damage accumulation in brittle hillslope materials. This paper tests the hypothesis that spatial distributions of earthquake-induced landslides are determined by both the conditions at the time of the triggering earthquake (time-independent factors) and the legacy of past events (time-dependent factors).