Displacement trends of slow-moving landslides: Classification and forecasting

A framework is proposed to characterize and forecast the displacement trends of slow-moving landslides, defined as the reactivation stage of phenomena in rocks or fine-grained soils, with movements localized along one or several existing shear surfaces. The framework is developed based on a thorough analysis of the scientific literature and with reference to significant reported case studies for which a consistent dataset of continuous displacement measurements is available. Three distinct trends of movement are defined to characterize the kinematic behavior of the active stages of slow-moving landslides in a velocity-time plot: a linear trend-type I, which is appropriate for stationary phenomena; a convex shaped trend-type II, which is associated with rapid increases in pore water pressure due to rainfall, followed by a slow decrease in the groundwater level with time; and a concave shaped trend-type III, which denotes a non-stationary process related to the presence of new boundary conditions such as those associated with the development of a newly formed local slip surface that connects with the main existing slip surface. Within the proposed framework, a model is developed to forecast future displacements for active stages of trend-type II based on displacement measurements at the beginning of the stage. The proposed model is validated by application to two case studies.