C.J. Van Westen

C.J. Van Westen
University of Twente, Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC) · Earth Systems Analysis

PhD Eng. Geology, TUDelt

About

394
Publications
330,574
Reads
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19,286
Citations
Citations since 2017
105 Research Items
11644 Citations
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Introduction
Dr. Cees van Westen carried out research on different hazard and risk related aspects: landslide hazard and risk (e.g. European Alps, Romania, India, China, Vietnam, Colombia, Central America, Caribbean, Caucasus, Central Asia), volcanic hazard and risk assessment (Colombia, Philippines, Central America, South America), earthquake-induced hazards (China, Nepal), rainfall-induced hazards and risk (Caribbean, India) and technological risk assessment (India).
Additional affiliations
January 2010 - present
http://www.changes-itn.eu/
Position
  • CHANGES
Description
  • The CHANGES network analyzes how global changes, related to environmental and climate change as well as socio-economical change, will affect the temporal and spatial patterns of hydro-meteorological hazards and associated risks in Europe;
July 1988 - present
University of Twente
Position
  • Associatie Professor
January 1986 - June 1988
University of Amsterdam
Position
  • Research Assistant

Publications

Publications (394)
Preprint
Full-text available
Shallow landslides represent potentially damaging processes in mountain areas worldwide. These geomorphic processes are usually caused by a combination of predisposing, preparatory, and triggering environmental factors. At regional scales, data-driven methods have been used to model shallow landslides by addressing the spatial and temporal componen...
Article
Full-text available
Hydro-morphological processes (HMP, any natural phenomenon contained within the spectrum defined between debris flows and flash floods) pose a relevant threat to infrastructure, urban and rural settlements and to lives in general. This has been widely observed in recent years and will likely become worse as climate change will influence the spatio-...
Preprint
Typhoons are recurrent meteorological phenomena in the South-eastern coastal area of China. They often trigger debris flows and other types of slope failure which cause significant economic damage and loss of life in an area with dense population and high economic activities. Accurate prediction of Typhoon-triggered debris flows and determination o...
Preprint
Full-text available
The literature on landslide susceptibility is rich with examples that span a large number of topics. However, the component that pertains to the extension of the susceptibility framework toward space-time modeling is largely unexplored. This statement is even more valid when looking at the landslide risk context, where hardly any scientific contrib...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Mapping landslides in space has gained a lot of attention over the past decade with good results. Current methods are primarily used to generate event inventories, but multi-temporal (MT) inventories are rare, even with manual landslide mapping. Here, we present an innovative deep learning strategy employing transfer learning. This allows our Atten...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Shallow landslides are frequently occurring hazards in mountainous landscapes all over the world. These processes are caused by a combination of static (i.e., predisposing factors: topography, material properties) and dynamic controls (i.e., preparatory and triggering factors: heavy rainfall, snow-melt). Data-driven methods have been used to model...
Article
Full-text available
Repeated temporal mapping of landslides is essential for investigating changes in landslide movements, legacy effects of the landslide triggering events, and susceptibility changes in the area. However, in order to perform such investigations, multi-temporal (MT) inventories of landslides are required. The traditional approach of visual interpretat...
Preprint
Full-text available
Ground motion simulations solve wave equations in space and time, thus producing detailed estimates of the shaking time series. This is essentially uncharted territory for geomorphologists, for we have yet to understand which ground motion (synthetic or not) parameter, or combination of parameters, is more suitable to explain the coseismic landslid...
Article
Full-text available
As the Third Pole of the Earth and the Water Tower of Asia, the Tibetan Plateau (TP) nurtures large numbers of glacial lakes, which are sensitive to global climate change. These lakes modulate the freshwater ecosystem in the region but concurrently pose severe threats to the valley population by means of sudden glacial lake outbursts and consequent...
Article
Full-text available
Mapping of landslides over space has seen an increasing attention and good results in the last decade. While current methods are chiefly applied to generate event-inventories, whereas multi-temporal (MT) inventories are rare, even using manual landslide mapping. Here, we present an innovative deep learning strategy which employs transfer learning t...
Preprint
Full-text available
The current status of technological advancement does not allow to generate complete flood simulations in real-time for large geographic areas. This hinders warning-systems, interactive planning tools and detailed forecasts and as a consequence the population cannot be quickly or reliably informed of where large masses of water will flow. Our novel...
Preprint
Full-text available
Co-seismic landslides are triggered by strong ground shaking in mountainous areas, resulting in threats to human activity and infrastructure. Methods for physically-based modelling of co-seismic landslide triggering play an important role in disaster prevention and mitigation. Current approaches, however, focus on direct and full failure of sloping...
Preprint
In order to develop reliable models, the geoscientific community requires high-resolution data sets. However, the collection of such data is a persistent challenge due to the limitations of resources. The concept of super-resolution, a method from the field of machine learning, can be used to predict a high-resolution version of a low-resolution da...
Preprint
Full-text available
Hydro-morphological processes (HMP, any natural phenomenon contained within the spectrum defined between debris flows and flash floods) pose a relevant threat to infrastructure, urban and rural settlements and to lives in general. This has been widely observed in recent years and will likely become worse as climate change will influence the spatio-...
Article
Full-text available
Small Island Developing States (SIDS) are acknowledged as particularly vulnerable to extreme climate events; however, the realities for transport infrastructure and bridges are still poorly studied. Assessing bridges in this context can be challenging due to data scarcity, a lack of local standards, and uncertainty due to climate change. While brid...
Preprint
Full-text available
Landslide susceptibility assessment using data-driven models has predominantly focused on predicting where landslides may occur and not on how large they might be. The spatio-temporal evaluation of landslide susceptibility has only recently been addressed, as a basis for predicting where and when landslides might occur. The present study combines t...
Article
Full-text available
The 2008 Wenchuan earthquake lead to various complex multi-hazard chains that included seismically triggered landslide initiation, landslide runout, river damming, dam breaching, and flooding. The modeling of the interactions between such hazardous processes is challenging due to the complexity and uncertainty. Here we present an event-based physic...
Article
Full-text available
The mapping and characterisation of building footprints is a challenging task due to inaccessibility and incompleteness of the required data, thus hindering the estimation of loss caused by natural and anthropogenic hazards. Major advancements have been made in the collaborative mapping of buildings with platforms like OpenStreetMap, however, many...
Article
Land use and land cover changes (LULCCs) in mountainous areas may increase the susceptibility to landslides due to modifications of topography, vegetation, and material characteristics. Understanding the relation between LULCCs and landslide occurrences is important for landslide prevention and land resources management. In this study, these change...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Landslides of the slide-type movement represent a potential threat to people and infrastructure in mountain areas all over the world. At regional scales, data-driven models are typically used to assess landslide susceptibility, i.e., to map where landslides are more or less likely to occur. Such assessments frequently serve as basic input for lands...
Preprint
Full-text available
Portraying spatiotemporal variations in landslide susceptibility patterns is crucial for landslide prevention and management. In this study, we implement a space-time modeling approach to predict the landslide susceptibility on a yearly basis across the main island of Taiwan, from 2004 to 2018. We use a Bayesian version of a binomial generalized ad...
Preprint
Full-text available
Repeated temporal mapping of landslides is essential for investigating changes in landslide movements, legacy effects of the landslide triggering events, and susceptibility changes in the area. However, in order to perform such investigations, multi-temporal (MT) inventories of landslides are required. The traditional approach of visual interpretat...
Preprint
Full-text available
Understanding the effects of snowmelt in terms of large slope deformation in high mountainous areas could come from the use of Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) techniques. In this work, we investigate a slow moving, extremely large landslide (~20 km2) in the Chitral region in Northern Pakistan, which threatens several villages. Our...
Preprint
Full-text available
For decades, a full numerical description of the spatio-temporal dynamics of a landslide could be achieved only via physics-based models. The part of the geomorphology community focusing on data-driven model has instead focused on predicting where landslides may occur via susceptibility models. Moreover, they have estimated when landslides may occu...
Article
Full-text available
Climatically-induced natural hazards are a threat to communities. They can cause life losses and heavy damage to infrastructure, and due to climate change, they have become increasingly frequent. This is especially the case in tropical regions, where major hurricanes have consistently appeared in recent history. Such events induce damage due to the...
Conference Paper
Super Resolution is a method for artificially increasing the imaging system's resolution by post processing without having to collect new datasets. It is mostly developed and used in computer graphics by the computer science community for image and video enhancement due to its capacity to add spatial variations in the data and perform better than c...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Shallow landslides of the slide-type movement represent potentially damaging events in mountain areas all over the world. These geomorphic processes are caused by a combination of predisposing factors (e.g., hillslope material), preparatory conditions (e.g., prolonged snow-melt), and triggers (e.g., heavy rainfall). Data-driven methods have been us...
Article
Full-text available
Hazardous surface processes such as floods and mass movements are often induced by a common trigger such as extreme precipitation. The relationship between the intensity of the trigger and the surface hazard is generally assumed to be monotonically increasing (increasing precipitation never decreases hazard intensity). The validity of this assumpti...
Article
Full-text available
Event-based landslide inventories are essential sources to broaden our understanding of the causal relationship between triggering events and the occurring landslides. Moreover, detailed inventories are crucial for the succeeding phases of landslide risk studies like susceptibility and hazard assessment. The openly available inventories differ in t...
Preprint
Full-text available
The 2008 Wenchuan earthquake lead to various complex multi-hazard chains that included seismically-triggered landslide initiation, landslide run-out, river damming, dam breaching and flooding. The modelling of the interactions between such hazardous processes is challenging due to the complexity and uncertainty. Here we present an event-based physi...
Article
Full-text available
Mapping existing landslides is a fundamental prerequisite to build any reliable susceptibility model. From a series of landslide presence/absence conditions and associated landscape characteristics, a binary classifier learns how to distinguish potentially stable and unstable slopes. In data rich areas where landslide inventories are available, add...
Preprint
Full-text available
Climatically-induced natural hazards are a threat to communities. They can cause life losses and heavy damage to infrastructure, and due to climate change, they have become increasingly frequent. This is especially in tropical regions, where major hurricanes have consistently appeared in recent history. Such events induce damage due to the high win...
Article
Transportation networks are severely affected by natural hazards, including landslides. The prioritization of maintenance works is required to preserve the efficiency and functionality of road infrastructure. To overcome the subjectivity of traditional visual inspections for road pavement condition assessment, advanced (semi-)automatic approaches h...
Article
Full-text available
Earthquakes increase landslide susceptibility in post-seismic periods. The time required for restoring pre-earthquake susceptibility levels is defined as landslide recovery time. Overall, stronger earthquakes are associated with relatively long recovery times in the literature. However, the seismic effect does not explain the whole process. This pa...
Preprint
Full-text available
Earthquakes do not only trigger landslides in co-seismic phases but also elevate post-seismic landslide susceptibility either by causing a strength reduction in hillslope materials or by producing co-seismic landslide deposits, which are prone to further remobilization under the external forces generated by subsequent rainfall events. However, we s...
Article
Full-text available
Floods are frequent hydro-meteorological hazards which cause losses in many parts of the world. In hilly and mountainous environments, floods often contain sediments which are derived from mass movements and soil erosion. The deposited sediments cause significant direct damage, and indirect costs of clean-up and sediment removal. The quantification...
Article
Full-text available
Mass movements such as debris flows and landslides differ in behaviour due to their material properties and internal forces. Models employ generalized multi-phase flow equations to adaptively describe these complex flow types. Such models commonly assume unstructured and fragmented flow, where internal cohesive strength is insignificant. In this wo...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
This paper discusses approaches to evaluate how landslide risk might change over time. Multi-hazard risk assessment (MHRA) is the quantitative estimation of the spatial distributions of potential losses for an area, of multiple natural hazards with different hazard interactions, with multiple event probabilities, for multiple types of elements-at-r...
Method
Full-text available
This document is a training manual, for a course on „Changing Multi-Hazard Risk Assessment for Decision making“. It is accompanied by a GIS dataset and an Open Source and a simple to use GIS system (ILWIS). It is aimed for a course of 10 -13 days. The training material is freely available and can be used in other courses, as long as you cite the re...
Data
Data set belonging to the tutorial, for a course on „Changing Multi-Hazard Risk Assessment for Decision making“. It is accompanied by a tutorial text and an Open Source and a simple to use GIS system (ILWIS). It is aimed for a course of 10 -13 days. The training material is freely available and can be used in other courses, as long as you cite the...
Article
The application of physically-based approaches for slope failure analysis at a catchment scale remains a difficult challenge, and several new models have been proposed in recent years. The assumptions of these models vary significantly. Tools such as random ellipsoid sampling provide detailed assessment of failure probability but due to numerical c...
Article
Full-text available
The vast majority of statistically-based landslide susceptibility studies assumes the slope instability process to be time-invariant under the definition that “the past and present are keys to the future”. This assumption may generally be valid. However, the trigger, be it a rainfall or an earthquake event, clearly varies over time. And yet, the te...
Article
Full-text available
Rainfall-induced landslide inventories can be compiled using remote sensing and topographical data, gathered using either traditional or semi-automatic supervised methods. In this study, we used the PlanetScope imagery and deep learning convolution neural networks (CNNs) to map the 2018 rainfall-induced landslides in the Kodagu district of Karnatak...
Chapter
Full-text available
Landslide is a common natural disaster occurring in Indonesia during the rainy season from November to February. Attempts have been made to develop an early warning system based on the rainfall derived from satellite observation. It is essential to verify the accuracy level of the rainfall threshold in predicting the occurrence of rainfall, causing...
Code
The excutable file of Slipfitter, programmed by Xianzheng Zhang
Article
Full-text available
Event-based landslide inventories are important for analyzing the relationship between the intensity of the trigger (e.g., rainfall, earthquake) and the density of the landslides in a particular area as a basis for the estimation of the landslide probability and the conversion of susceptibility maps into hazard maps required for risk assessment. Th...
Article
Full-text available
Event-based landslide inventories are important for analyzing the relationship between the intensity of the trigger (e.g., rainfall, earthquake) and the density of the landslides in a particular area as a basis for the estimation of the landslide probability and the conversion of susceptibility maps into hazard maps required for risk assessment. Th...
Article
Full-text available
Event-based landslide inventories are important for analyzing the relationship between the intensity of the trigger (e.g., rainfall, earthquake) and the density of the landslides in a particular area as a basis for the estimation of the landslide probability and the conversion of susceptibility maps into hazard maps required for risk assessment. Th...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
This paper gives an overview of recent research on generating landslide inventories of triggering events by earthquake and extreme rainfall in the Himalayan context, and how these influence subsequent landslide susceptibility, hazard and risk assessment. Within a collaboration project between between ITC, GSI and NRSC , a number of techniques were...
Book
Full-text available
The Academy of ICT Essentials for Government Leaders module series has been developed by the Asian and Pacific Training Centre for Information and Communication Technology for Development (APCICT). This module introduces disaster risk management (DRM) and provides an overview of how information and communication technologies (ICTs) can be used for...
Article
Full-text available
Estimating landslide volume based on pre- and post-event elevation models without detailed field investigations is still a major challenge due to hidden failure surfaces. A MATLAB model named “SLIPFITTER” was developed to model failure surfaces using polynomial surface to fit the geometry of exposed scarps extracted from Digital Elevation Models (D...
Article
Full-text available
Satellite rainfall products for landslide early warning prediction have been spotlighted by several researchers, in the last couple of decades. This study investigates the use of TRMM and ERA-Interim data, for the determination of rainfall thresholds and the prediction of precipitation, respectively, to be used for landslide early warning purposes...