Department of Earth Sciences, University of Florence

The Department of Earth Sciences of the University of Florence (DST-UNIFI) is an important center for research and higher training in Italy. DST-UNIFI is a founding member of International Consortium on Landslides (ICL) since 2002, and in 2008, the DST-UNIFI was entitled as a World Centre of Excellence (WCoE) on Landslide Risk Reduction (2008–2011) by the Global Promotion Committee of International Programme on Landslides of UN-ISDR. This recognition was reaffirmed three times over for 2011–2014, 2014–2017, and 2017–2020. Since 2016, the DST-UNIFI has been appointed as UNESCO Chair on Prevention and sustainable management of geohydrological hazards. At the national level, since 2005, the DST-UNIFI is the official Centre of Competence of the Italian civil protection for remote-sensing and geohydrological hazards. The expertise of the research team includes remote-sensing techniques and application of space-borne and ground-based SAR interferometry, monitoring ground instabilities and development of early warning systems, and GIS-based quantitative models for hazard and risk prediction. The group participates in research and technological development projects in several areas of the world, often in active collaboration with international, national, and regional organizations and agencies. Since 2002, DST-UNIFI has coordinated or has been involved in several ICL-IPL projects, and DST-UNIFI is the proposer of the ICL Italian network that has been officially established in December 2018.