Brief communication: AI-driven rapid landslide mapping following the 2024 Hualien earthquake in Taiwan

On April 2nd, 2024, a Mw 7.4 earthquake struck Taiwan’s eastern coast, triggering numerous landslides and severely impacting infrastructure. To create the preliminary inventory of earthquake-induced landslides in Eastern Taiwan ( 3,300 km2) we deployed automated landslide detection methods by combining Earth Observation (EO) data with Artificial Intelligence (AI) models. The models allowed us to 5 identify 7,090 landslide events covering >75 km2, in about 3 hours after the acquisition of the EO imagery. This research underscores AI’s role in enhancing landslide detection for disaster response and situational awareness, and the landslide inventory can improve the understanding of earthquake-landslide interactions to improve seismic hazard mitigation.