Storm-Induced and Seismic-Induced Landslides across Puerto Rico's Juvenile Landscape: Hazard Recognition, Quantification, and Long-Term Impacts

In Puerto Rico, the recent exposition to successive natural disasters that cause landslides represents a unique opportunity to collect data that can be used to better model and predict slope failures across the densely populated island. After Hurricane Maria in 2017, a detailed event inventory of over 70,000 mass wasting sites was cataloged and used along with several geospatial datasets to develop a new statistically robust rainfall-induced mass wasting susceptibility map for the territory. Although the susceptibility map was created for excessive rainfall conditions, in a qualitative analysis it performed relatively well in predicting failure sites triggered by the 2020 M 6.4 southwestern Puerto Rico earthquake and associated seismic sequence. More detailed comparison of the susceptibility map using a mass wasting inventory for the seismic sequence will help to evaluate the product's potential applicability to ground shaking in addition to extreme precipitation. The analysis of the landscape changes provoked by these natural disasters will help with the overarching challenge to better understand landslide occurrence and also their long-term cascading effects like sedimentation and reservoir capacity reduction.