BGC Engineering’s Matt Lato, Ph.D., P.Eng. and Cambio Earth Systems’ Katie Burkell, P.Eng were featured in the InGEOnius Innovations column of Geostrata Magazine’s August edition.
In the article “Playing Hide and Seek with Landslides,” they discuss how landslide risk management is crucial due to increasing populations and decreasing tolerance for geohazard risks. It involves identifying hazards, assessing risks, and managing them without a definitive endpoint. Traditional methods for creating landslide inventories include airphoto interpretation and fieldwork, but recent advances in airborne lidar and automated processing have improved the accuracy and detail of these inventories. Lidar can penetrate tree cover to create high-resolution 3D models of the ground, and when used over time, it can detect changes in the Earth’s surface caused by landslides. Previously, lidar change detection was slow and expensive, but new GPU-based algorithms have made it over 50 times faster, allowing for regional-scale analyses that are more accurate and cost-effective. This technology supports various stages of landslide risk management, from identification to recovery, helping decision-makers understand risks, plan fieldwork, and make informed decisions on geohazard management.