Moving Forward: Future Improvements

Tomorrow is the final day for the project, what is left to do and what can be improved?

At the time of this post, there are several things that have not been fully actualized. A major factor that would need more work is the ethical problem that ties into the project. Due to the issues in data and situations there was never any map that helps contextualize ethical issues into the landslide susceptibility maps. Although ethical issues are nebulus in nature, there still should have been something that brings it to life in the maps.

Better data is something else that we would want in the future. Albania’s level of soil data for this project is not present at the public level at least. With more research and digging something could turn up, but it does require time. Another thing that would have been a huge help would be a comprehensisve landslide inventory. Future attempts could look at either creating a slap dash landslide inventory from lots of research in the landslide history of Albania or actually asking for data from the Albanian government.

More models would also be an improvement on the project as a whole. The Critical Rainfall Model is useful, but has issues that we have already outlined on the model page. Multiple models would create a more wholistic picture that could provide better details and help narrow down the areas that are actually at risk.

Finally, there is a lot that cna be improved in any project, but what are the first future steps that this project could go into? This project is at a point that it could be used to tenetively do a comparison project between the two cities. Again it would work better with another US city or other EU city that has better data attached to it. This comparison study would be able to bring in ethical questions, like who lives in the areas labeled dangerously unstable in the landlside susceptibility maps? Is there a trend? What are those areas actually used for? One ethical question that is being aimed at here is how do these maps affect land use and discrimination. If you figure out that your maps actually lead to certain areas being developed for soley poor people that are in these danger zones thats a significant issue. Basically they are spatialy segregating people in an economic class due to the danger invovled. Now that is just an example that hasn’t been done for these areas yet, and it would be a useful study to see how your products are being used.