weaken the material and cause cracks that will eventually produce a landslide; volcanic eruptions; Landslides are aggravated by human activities, such as: deforestation, cultivation and construction; vibrations from machinery or traffic; blasting and mining; earthwork (e.g. by altering the shape of a slope, or imposing new loads); in shallow soils, the removal of deep-rooted vegetation that binds colluvium to bedrock; agricultural or forestry activities (logging), and urbanization, which change the amount of water infiltrating the soil. temporal variation in land use and land cover (LULC): it includes the human abandonment of farming areas, e.g. due to the economic and social transformations which occurred in Europe after the Second World War. Land degradation and extreme rainfall can increase the frequency of erosion and landslide phenomena. Types Hungr-Leroueil-Picarelli classification In traditional usage, the term landslide has at one time or another been used to cover almost all forms of mass movement of rocks and regolith at the Earth's surface. In 1978, geologist David Varnes noted this imprecise usage and proposed a new, much tighter scheme for the classification of mass movements and subsidence processes. This scheme was later modified by Cruden and Varnes in 1996, and refined by Hutchinson (1988), Hungr et al. (2001), and finally by Hungr, Leroueil and Picarelli (2014). The classification resulting from the latest update is provided below. Under this classification, six types of movement are recognized. Each type can be seen both in rock and in soil. A fall is a movement of isolated blocks or chunks of soil in free-fall. The term topple refers to blocks coming away by rotation from a vertical face. A slide is the movement of a body of material that generally remains intact while moving over one or several inclined surfaces or thin layers of material (also called shear zones) in which large deformations are concentrated. Slides are also sub-classified by the form of the surface(s) or shear zone(s) on which movement happens. The planes may be broadly parallel to the surface ("planar slides") or spoon-shaped ("rotational slides"). Slides can occur catastrophically, but movement on the surface can also be gradual and progressive. Spreads are a form of subsidence, in which a layer of material cracks, opens up, and expands laterally. Flows are the movement of fluidised material, which can be both dry or rich in water (such as in mud flows). Flows can move imperceptibly for years, or accelerate rapidly