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Book review |
University of Plymouth
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These proceedings contain 18 separate articles, including keynote submissions (Earl Brabb et al.; Oldrich Hungr) and an invited paper (Gareth Hearn). It should be noted that the title of the book is somewhat misleading, as this is primarily a collection of papers on landslides, albeit within the context of natural terrain hazards, and mainly concentrates on landslides in Hong Kong. However, the book is a delight to read, as the quality of the material (if not all the illustrations) is extremely high and the editors should be congratulated on their refereeing process.
The papers fall into three main categories:
One exception is the keynote by Brabb et al. that provides a fascinating global overview on what governments’ are doing to reduce the consequences of landslides and contains nearly 90 mainly recent references on the subject. It is difficult to separate out individual papers given the generally high standard but, from a personal perspective, there are a number of articles of particular interest. The invited paper by Hearn provides a very useful review of modern terrain evaluation techniques illustrated by case studies from Nepal and Hong Kong. Lee et al. describe the way a GIS has been combined with an Artificial Intelligence technique to establish a method for landslide susceptibility mapping. The approach appears to have had some real success in a test area on Lantau Island and, clearly, the method has a great deal of potential. Free
