This book provides professionals, researchers and students alike with a comprehensive understanding of the global distribution of landslide dams, their types, frequencies, and regional to national challenges in their research and mitigation. Landslides blocking river valleys and causing lakes to form requires favourable topographic factors and landslide as well as river dynamics. Hence, each region faces unique challenges in landslide dam research and mitigation. Reporting from around the world, each chapter addresses a different geographic region, presents its landslide dam inventory and analyses the data under the aspects of the specific geological-hydrogeological-metereological conditions, data quality and biases, involved landslide types, and provides a brief survey of the policies surrounding dam mitigation. The regional chapters are accompanied by a new data-collection protocol, definition of terminology, and a call for guidelines for science-informed practice.

It is a valuable reference work for anyone interested in landslide dams.

Anja Dufresne is a senior scientist, Landslide Group lead at the Department of Engineering Geology, RWTH Aachen, Germany. She studied geological sciences at the Universities of Göttingen (Germany) and, supported by a teaching assistantship, Massachusetts at Amherst (USA). She completed her Ph.D. in 2009 at the University of Canterbury (Christchurch, New Zealand) where she studied volcanic and non-volcanic landslides under an international doctoral scholarship from the New Zealand government. After relocating to her home country, Germany, she worked as a part-time postdoc at Freiburg University where she later successfully funded her own, full-time project on rock avalanche sedimentology. After a three-month stay as a visiting scientist in British Colombia in 2016, she moved to Aachen, Germany, where she took on her current position as senior scientist and research group lead at the Department of Engineering Geology.

Andrea Wolter is an engineering geologist and network development specialist with more than 10 years of experience in slope stability, geomorphology, geology, rock and soil mechanics, emergency responses, community engagement, and teaching. She completed her Ph.D. at Simon Fraser University, Canada, on understanding large, sudden rock avalanches and their mechanisms. This was her first exposure to landslide dams. In 2014, she moved to Switzerland to take up a research and lecturing position at ETH Zürich. After three years in the Alps, she took a sabbatical to learn about permaculture, sustainable living, and cultural heritage. Returning to Canada, she worked as a consultant before travelling to Aotearoa New Zealand. Andrea has been in NZ for six years, at Earth Sciences New Zealand.

Xuanmei Fan is the director of the State Key Laboratory of Geohazard Prevention and Geoenvironment Protection (SKLGP) at Chengdu University of Technology, China. She received her Ph.D. in Engineering Geology from the Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC), University of Twente, the Netherlands. Her research focuses on earthquake- and climate change-induced cascading geological hazards. She developed a near-real-time prediction model for earthquake-triggered landslides and landslide dams, which has been widely applied in emergency response and post-earthquake rescue operations. Her recent research aims to understand climate change-driven cascading hazards in high mountain regions, particularly the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau. She has published more than 140 ISI-indexed papers in leading international journals, including Nature Geoscience, Science Advances, Nature Communications, Reviews of Geophysics, EPSL, GRL, JGR, etc.