Transcript:

 

BRAD NEWBOLD 0:00
Hello everybody and welcome to We Measure the World, a podcast produced by scientists for scientists…

STEPHEN HUGHES 0:06
I noticed that there was this opportunity to do an inventory of of all the landslide sites. And so you know, we visited many, many landslide sites. But we were lucky to have a really great aerial imagery data set for the whole island. And so I sent a message out to some students in our geology department at EPR, in Mayaguez and I said, I’m going to do this project, we’re going to inventory all the landslides from Hurricane Maria, please come to the university, we have power, we have water and we have internet and I had a group of about 10 students show up and we got to work.

BRAD NEWBOLD 0:42
That’s just a small taste of what we have in store for you today. We measure the world explores interesting environmental research trends, how scientists are solving research issues, and what tools are helping them better understand measurements across the entire soil plant atmosphere continuum. Today’s guest is Dr. Steven Hughes. Steven is a professor in the Department of Geology at the University of Puerto Rico Mayaguez. He obtained his Bachelor’s in geology and Earth Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and his PhD in geology from North Carolina State University. He teaches classes in structural geology, geomorphology, and field geology. And his research projects have focused mostly on tropical landslides and landscape evolution with the funding of such organizations as the NSF, USGS, USDA, and NOAA. And today, he’s here to talk to us about all things landslides, including monitoring, forecasting and susceptibility impacts and mitigation, and more. So, Steven, thanks so much for being here.

STEPHEN HUGHES 1:38
Thank you guys I appreciate the invitation. It’s pleasure.

BRAD NEWBOLD 1:41
Alright. With all of our guests, we like to start out, getting to know them a little bit better. And so we’d love for you to tell us a little bit of your background, how you got into the sciences in general and specifically how did you end up in this specialty with landslide research?

STEPHEN HUGHES 1:58
Like you just read there I went to UNC Chapel Hill for undergrad I didn’t know what I wanted to study and actually went down to the wire to declare my major finally picked geology and just ran with it. You know, when when I went to undergrad, I didn’t know what grad school was, you know, I thought, you know, you go to college and that’s it and finally started you know, discovering these new avenues and opportunities. And I got lucky to go to grad school, I got lucky to sort of stumble into a PhD project. I didn’t study landslides or hazards in grad school, I studied old Appalachian Mountain tectonics, you know, 450 million year old mints of plates and and fragments of plates. Then I finished grad school, I applied to a bunch of jobs, I got one of them and I moved to Puerto Rico and I was surrounded by different types of hazards, flooding, landslides, earthquakes, almost everything you could think of coastal erosion, tsunami potential, but almost everything except volcanic hazards. So So yeah, just, you know, life gave me landslides, and I study landslides now.

BRAD NEWBOLD 3:11
Now that you’re there in Puerto Rico, one of the main projects and this is kind of going to be this is gonna be our main focus for today. And we’re really interested to hear about this project and your your work within it is the SILIDES PR, which is stands for storm induced landslide impact dynamics on Environment and Society in Puerto Rico. I’m sure you had a lot of fun or somebody had a lot of fun coming up with that acronym. But can you tell us a little bit about about the beginnings of what this project is and and how it came about?

STEPHEN HUGHES 3:43
Alright. Yeah. So So I moved to Puerto Rico in 2014, 10 years ago now. And it’s a great place to think about geology, the do all kinds of science, very diverse geology, diverse soils, different little microclimates. And it’s a pretty small island. Yeah, you know, the sort of colloquial explanation is 100 miles wide by 35 miles north. And a couple of weeks after I moved here, we had a big hurricane, Hurricane Maria in 2017, it was sort of a watershed moment in many of our lives for many different reasons. You know, some people moved away from Puerto Rico, some people major changes in their lives. And, you know, everything was sort of reset in the worst way possible, you know, no power, no water, no communications or anything for quite some time. So that the hurricane came through and in the in the months after, you know, saw what was happening around me, and you know, it was really hard to get around that period of time, especially in the interior part of the island, which is the most mountainous so I noticed that there was this opportunity to do an inventory of of all the landslide sites and so you know, we visited many, many landslide sites, but we were lucky to have a really great aerial imagery, data set for the whole island. And so I sent a message out to some students in our geology department at UPR in Mayaguez, and I said, I’m going to do this project, we’re going to inventory all the landslides from Hurricane Maria, please come to the university, we have power, we have water, and we have internet. And I had a group of about 10 students show up, and we got to work and and so that was sort of the beginning of, of what has morphed into a bigger project, long term project. And so a lot of steps along the way. But that was how we got started. So that that hurricane Maria in 2017. And so we ended up with an inventory of over 70,000, landslide, headscarf sites, and that was published. And then we went on to do other things. So I’ve had a lot of great undergrad research students and a lot of great masters students along the way. And so I guess if we started in 2017, were seven or eight years in now.

LEO RIVERA 6:04
How many, uh, how many landslides were triggered by that hurricane?

Speaker 1 6:08
Yeah. So that’s the number that we came up with was that 70,000? Wow, yeah, most of the landslides that we see from Hurricane Maria or most landslides in Puerto Rico are shallow soil movements, a lot of times they transition into debris flows. The case with Hurricane Maria was special, because there was another hurricane that had sort of sideswiped Puerto Rico, two weeks before. And so that sort of set the scene for many landslides across the island. And we had this aerial imagery data set, and that made it possible to actually, you know, manually one by one, go review each site, you know, have that data set.

BRAD NEWBOLD 6:54
So at the beginning at that at that stage, I mean, what were the what were the goals? Was it simply just to try to take an inventory? Was there anything beyond that as to try and figure out, you know, I guess to get into any more details than that, or was that kind of basically it right there at that beginning point.

STEPHEN HUGHES 7:10
That, that was the initial goal. I always knew once we had the inventory, we’d be able to build off of that, especially, you know, for susceptibility map purposes. And that’s what we did. So we took this inventory. And you know, when you’re when you want to build an empirical model, or an empirical susceptibility map, having ground truth data is like gold. Right? And so we had all these headscarf points. And so we were able to use that dataset, and really carefully look at different factors at each site, you know, of course, slope, the soil type, the geology, the curvature, the land use, how far away from road cuts or roadways, how far away from fluvial channels, and a lot of other metrics that we were able to calculate for this, this large dataset of, of headscarf points. And so though, yeah, the idea was that, you know, let’s, let’s do this inventory. And let’s go from there, you know, Hurricane Maria was in 2017. And we didn’t publish the inventory until 2019. So it was a, it was a process, it was very difficult. And, you know, if I didn’t have that great group of students at the at the onset there, we wouldn’t have been able to proceed with things like the susceptibility maps that we created for the whole island or our monitoring network that we have, or our new office that we’re that we’re hopefully going to open pretty soon on campus.

BRAD NEWBOLD 8:46
I mean, you mentioned 70,000 landslides that you category that you inventoried, were you going through and categorizing and getting measurements on each and every one of them, or was it did you go into, you know, kind of a sampling process after that?

Speaker 1 8:59
Well, what’s what’s I guess I’ll say convenient is that before Hurricane Maria, about one year before Hurricane Maria, we had a complete LiDAR based survey across the whole island. So we had really good high resolution topographic data of the before. And then after the event, there was another dataset of LiDAR collected across the whole island. So we had this snapshot of before and after. And so once we use the aerial imagery to determine our or to build our inventory, we’re able to look at each site and determine especially area and volume metrics, and so that the relationship between the area and the volume is important. This the scaling, obviously if landsides are deeper, they’ll have a larger volume for any given area or if they’re more shallow they have a smaller volume and so we’re able to look at that area volume scale. Looking for specific conditions, specific soil types, specific slope angles. And then with that information, you know, we can look at, for example, the amount of sediment that we think, was mobilized in a certain watershed. And nice to think about this sort of on watershed scale, especially because many of our watersheds are, we have reservoirs, you know, to store fresh water. And so those reservoirs caught a lot of this landslide, sediment. And so we’re able to measure in the headwaters where, you know, the amount of sediment we think was mobilized. And then we’ve partnered that with bathymetric surveys in some of our reservoirs and try to compare and contrast where we think is, you know, coming out of the hillside and what’s getting deposited at this at the reservoir, which is the sink for most of the sediment.

BRAD NEWBOLD 10:56
With, with all this now, are you setting up remote sensing stations now is that is that kind of like the next step of of how this this project has evolved?

STEPHEN HUGHES 11:05
Right, so we do have a network of monitoring stations. So we’ve chosen sites across the island where we think landslide susceptibility is, is pretty high, we install monitoring stations across these areas. So right now we have 18, stations, though, that network is collaborative with the Geological Survey, United States Geological Survey, landslide hazard group. And so that monitoring network started out with two stations in 2018. And then we’ve been able to really ramp up on the past two or three years. And right now we have about eight, we have 18 stations. And, you know, we use those stations as sort of representative locations across across the island. So you don’t, we don’t measure the potential for landsliding in any one specific place. What we want to measure are the soil moisture conditions in a place that we think is representative of a smaller region or a little bit bigger region, and then use those metrics, and then use new landslides that we that we can we can observe, and we can, you know, see, at the same time that we had our monitoring station, and then using, use that combination of information and data to try to get metrics or thresholds to forecasts when more landslides might be likely or or, or potential in the future.

LEO RIVERA 12:38
What are you guys measuring at these stations Stephen?

STEPHEN HUGHES 12:40
Right, so we measure rainfall, we measure volumetric water content, we measure soil suction, and we measure groundwater pressure. And so all of our measurements other than the other than the rainfall, of course, are in the soil. Right. So we, we choose a site, we dig to the base of the soil, which is usually on these steep hill slopes which have suffered erosion during human times. And even before we have about a meter of soil on on on a pretty steep slope in general. And so we install different levels of sensors until we get to the base of the soil.

LEO RIVERA 13:26
And that base is when you’re hitting the bedrock is that what you’re considering that?

STEPHEN HUGHES 13:30
I call it bedrock. A person from a non tropical area might not call it bedrock. But it’s something that is uh, it’s something that’s less like soil and a little more like saprolite, right, regolith type thing. So, and we’ve we’ve seen a lot that this boundary between, you know, legitimate soil and regolith or saprolite below is quite often the surface where where we see the movement.

LEO RIVERA 13:58
Right, that makes sense.

BRAD NEWBOLD 14:00
So along along these lines, I mean, there’s critical measurements that you’re finding what what I guess, what have you been finding, when it comes to the triggering of these landslides? Have any of these findings been surprising in any way?

STEPHEN HUGHES 14:15
Right, so, you know, years ago, there was this idea that a tropical place like Puerto Rico, that the soils were always saturated, and you didn’t need to really think about antecedent soil conditions. And you know, in terms of landsliding but it turns out you know, like I mentioned before, we got quite a diverse mixture of soils, you know, we have very clay rich soils, we have sandy soils, colluvial soils, and they all act different and so we you know, we do have some monitoring sites where the soils are, you know, almost completely saturated all year. And then we have some that are much less saturated during during the year it’s especially during our dry season. And so they’re, I call them more flashy, you know, they fill up and they drain out pretty quick. And so to answer your question, one key observation that we have is how are the soils reacting to different amounts of precipitation across the island, which is small, remember, but even in, you know, close proximity to each other, some of the stations are, or some of the soils are reacting and behaving much differently. So, so that’s one thing. And another thing is that, we can see pretty well how much rain will saturate just sort of the top bit of soil. And so, you know, we could have a two inch rain event, and maybe the base of the soil isn’t affected at all. So it just depends each area, how the how the soil is reacting is behaving. And, you know, this week, actually, now that we’re into May, we’re sort of in our mini rainy season. And so we’ve had sort of these successive days, one or two, or even more inches per day, and we’ve been able to see, you know, a one inch rain event, after, you know, a week of two inch rain events, you know, may may increase the soil saturation more than one of the initial two inch rain events. So just sort of this this dynamic between the soil and the precipitation and, and things like that.

BRAD NEWBOLD 16:24
I know, I was looking at one of one of the publications that you were involved in, that was looking at the slope, and the I guess use of the relationship between between the incline of the slope and and the susceptibility, or the triggering of the landslides. And if I remember right, and you can correct me is that is that some of what you were seeing was, was that a lot of the, there were more landslides associated with moderate slopes than the steeper ones. Is that Is that correct? Am I, am I understanding that, and that was kind of an interesting finding there?

STEPHEN HUGHES 16:57
I think you got a pretty good um, so what we actually found out is that if slope is extremely steep, you know, we’re talking 80 degrees or 90 degrees, there’s, there’s likely no soil there, it’s likely, if anything’s going to happen, it’s going to be a rock fall. So the mechanism when you get that steep, if the soil can’t, if a slope, can’t hold the soil, then it’s going to be a totally different movement of rocks. And though we have, we have different areas across the island, especially in our North Coast, we have karst limestone, dissolved away, and so we have caves and sinkholes and the opposite of sinkholes, which we call Mogote’s. And so they have really steep sides, these features and so there’s, there’s almost no soil or no soil, on on these extremely steep slopes. And so that’s why when we did that analysis, we, we found that the steeper slopes, you know, they do fail, but the soil failures are much, much more common when they’re when there actually is soil. So that’s, I think that’s what we were trying to get at, whenever, whenever he wrote that, if that makes sense.

BRAD NEWBOLD 18:08
Yeah, yeah, definitely.

LEO RIVERA 18:09
Yep no, I mean, you kind of need soil there for the soil driven failures.

BRAD NEWBOLD 18:15
Yeah.

STEPHEN HUGHES 18:15
Right, and that’s sort of one one thing with where we install our stations, you know, where we install them, it’s quite steep terrain, but you get past a certain certain angle, and there’s just not much soil left. And so if there’s no soil, I can’t, I can’t install anything.

LEO RIVERA 18:36
So Stephen, you said that, you know, you when you guys were doing that, that really detailed analysis of 70,000 landslides. You were looking at other factors like land use and, and proximity to roadways and things like that. Were there other things that sit out beyond just the you know, the slopes that were more likely to result in in landslides?

Right, actually so I think our strongest correlation was the soil map unit, but also, you know, really important, like you mentioned is the proximity to roads. So I think we did the math that if if Puerto Rico was an independent jurisdiction, it would be the ninth highest road density in all of the world. And so that includes wow, you know, places like Monaco and Vatican City that are like, city states, essentially. And so we have a lot of roads here. We have even more roads than than we used in that analysis. We have a history of intense agriculture across the island. We have a dense population of you know, of humans here. And so there’s roads everywhere and there’s also abandoned roads that you know, are now covered in jungle but as as you move across the lands gave, you know, through the, through the bush, you can realize, hey, I’m on an old road cut. And maybe, you know, there might be 50 year old trees or you know, 75 year old trees as you’re walking, but you can see you’re on a road cut. And so that legacy of improvised roads, I think it’s a good way to say it, you know, maybe first they were for ox, or maybe later, carts or something like that, that, that those improvised roads are essentially like a spiderweb, across our mountainous area. So these are places where they farmed coffee, citrus, tobacco, things like that, where they, where they farmed sugar is more down in the coastal areas, but up in the mountains, that those were the crops that, that were the main, the main focus. And so the way we made that model is we took all these analysis of these different factors, and then we mushed them all together. And then we came out with a map in the end, where we have every five meters on the island classified as you know, either low, medium, or high or really, really high physical susceptibility.

STEPHEN HUGHES 21:10
Yeah, that’s amazing. I took a look at that, at that map of yours. It’s yeah, the granularity is is incredible. And like you said, being able to have, you know, GIS, LiDAR. Now your your inventory of all of that. I mean, I’m, I’m a sucker for cool maps. I’ve got the the the Esri magazine comes to my house. And yeah, my wife and kids are like, what are you doing? And I’m like, I like the like the maps I like the charts, but again, that, again, that granularity, which then we’ll be able to, you know, and we’ll get into this here in a little bit, but then we’ll be able to inform future research, we’ll be able to inform, you know, prevention, mitigation efforts, all those kinds of things. I think one of the things too, that you mentioned about they’re in the central mountainous areas with all with that spiderweb of roads, I would assume that that’s where the my assumption would be, that’s where the greatest impacts would be. When it comes to this landslides. Is that Is that correct? And, and the places of greatest vulnerability? Where I guess, can you go into a little bit more detail about yeah, some of the impacts of these landslides that are, that are happening all over Puerto Rico?

Alright, yeah, so you hit the nail on the head, the central mountainous area. So I don’t know, I guess sort of roughly two thirds or three fourths of the island is, is pretty rugged mountain. And you know, we live on an island where our highest point is a little over 4,000 feet in elevation above sea level, but it’s within about 20 miles of sea level. So there’s a steep gradient, to get to get up to these higher areas. And so, as you might imagine, those central areas are more rural, there are less people, there are also less services, there are less hospitals, there are less, less of everything, less access. And there are also the areas that it rains the most because of the [inaudible] effect. And so there’s a lot of other factors. I mean, we could think about mean annual income and poverty rates. And so if you compare Puerto Rico to the rest of the United States, I think Mississippi is number 50, on a lot of lists, so we’re lower than Mississippi. And so there are challenges in a lot of different ways. There are sort of improvised constructions that are not permitted, and you know, things like this. And yeah, so whenever these landslides happen in mountainous areas, they, they, you know, they do hit houses or water infrastructure or things like that. But probably the most impactful situation is whenever they take out roads, either the road itself collapses, or the landslide falls down and covers the road. And it cuts off access to entire communities. And sometimes the community might be, you know, four houses, or sometimes it might be hundreds of houses. And so it complicates everything. Oftentimes, when there are landslides in the mountains, there are floods somewhere else, right. And so all of the folks who are responders are essentially pulled in every different direction. So a lot of also a lot of the people that live in these vulnerable rural community are older folks, the population dynamics of Puerto Rico are skewed towards older folks, because a lot of the younger people have moved away. So all these sort of layers of complications get wrapped in and then you know, landslides are just one one way to really disturb an already sort of fragile way of life.

BRAD NEWBOLD 24:49
Along, along with that, how have you seen, you know, over the time that you’ve been there, have you seen that that risk of landslides changing, I guess, over you know, over the past 10 to 15 years or so, with impacts of climate change intensification of storms, all those kinds of things.

STEPHEN HUGHES 25:05
Right, so yeah, I mean, I’ve lived here for 10 years, so I got a decent perspective, I think. And so it’s sort of, you know, there are changes with, with climate change, if you expect, you know, the Atlantic hurricane season to have more named hurricanes or more, you know, significant tropical storms, then, well, there’s more chance that one of them’s gonna gonna hit us. And in the grand scheme of things Puerto Rico’s a pretty small target. But more storms means more, more, more potential that and then one of them hits us and but it’s not just with these tropical storms and hurricanes coming through. You know we’ve, you know, we’re in the first week of May, right now. And there have been landslides scattered all around the island in the past week or so, because we have this weather system that’s called a trough. You know, it’s not a tropical cyclone or anything like that, but we just sort of get stuck in a very rainy week. And so we were actually in drought, you know, maybe a month or so ago. And now as the mini rainy season has kicked in, we’ve, we’ve seen landslides so they blocked roads, they’ve, you know, hit power poles and stuff like that. And so they’re not these big, deep bedrock landslides that, you know, move mountains, literally. But they’re the type of small deficient landslides that if you are unlucky enough, they’re, they’re, they can affect you in a really unfortunate way.

BRAD NEWBOLD 26:40
How then, are you taking what you’ve been learning? You mentioned about about your, your susceptibility map? How is that being communicated to the public? How are you interacting and cooperating with government agencies in order to inform the public? How’s that, how’s that moving, moving along there in Puerto Rico?

STEPHEN HUGHES 27:00
Right, yeah so one thing that I liked about our map is that it’s, it’s published in English, but it’s also prepared fully in Spanish as well.

LEO RIVERA 27:09
Yeah, I noticed that.

STEPHEN HUGHES 27:09
Um we have a landslide susceptibility or landslide guide for residents of Puerto Rico that was prepared only in Spanish, and then later translated to English, we have initiatives to get involved with, you know, municipality scale emergency manager. So in Puerto Rico, you know, it’s a small place. It’s about the size of Connecticut. So that’s good reference. There are 78 municipalities. And so that’s sort of our county equivalent. But so there’s a lot of different moving parts. We work with a local earth science museum called the Eco Exploratorium. So we give presentations, we have another initiative called landslide ready, which is our version of something that’s called tsunami ready, or storm ready. I don’t know if you’ve heard of that. But um, we are we’re pushing that idea. We have a pilot municipality partner on that. So it’s essentially a way for us to to have a line of communication with my emergency managers, not necessarily in the time of the emergency, but maybe just to orient whoever’s working at that scale about the maps, the guides that we have the data from our our stations, if it’s, it’s useful for them. So yeah, you know, and we have agreements with different groups, like our natural resource Natural Resources Agency, we have an agreement with them to where a few of our stations are on their lands, we have an agreement with conservancy group. So we try to we try to talk to anyone who will listen to this. So that, you know, they can, they can take her information, we also have a really good relationship with some of the TV, meteorologists folks here in Puerto Rico. So they quite often will share data from our monitoring stations, or they will share information from our, our guide, or, or residents are talking about signals that you can maybe expect a landslide, we’re really fortunate to have a good sort of ecosystem of collaborators, you know, some more formal, some more informal. We also work with a lot of community leaders in different sort of points around the island, usually connected to our where we have our monitoring station. So like I like I mentioned before we started here, you know, it’s a work in progress. And we’re trying to build this landslide hazard office in our university here in Mayaguez, in the west part of Puerto Rico. And so we’re having an opportunity to grow and we’re trying to continue that growth and, and hopefully do some useful stuff for more folks in Puerto Rico.

LEO RIVERA 30:00
That’s awesome. Yeah, you mentioned earlier that you guys will be opening, opening the new office on campus soon. So that office is purely focused on on landslides?

STEPHEN HUGHES 30:08
That’s right, that office will be called the Puerto Rico landslide hazard mitigation office. It’s been a process, but we’ll have a devoted space. And we’ll have, you know, a physical place that’s dedicated, you know, to the monitoring to the education efforts and all that stuff on campus. And so, we also have on campus, an office called the Puerto Rico seismic network. And so they, they monitor, you know, earthquakes, and they’re very involved with the tsunami education activities. And so we’re sort of modeling and sort of following the the script that the seismic network did, we’re just about 20 or 30 years behind.

LEO RIVERA 30:45
A little room to catch up, but that’s alright.

BRAD NEWBOLD 30:47
So what are what are some of the primary, I guess, impact mitigation efforts that are going on there in Puerto Rico currently? And what what are the what is it that the future of that look like?

STEPHEN HUGHES 30:59
Yeah, it’s tough. I mean, so essentially, we know landslides are going to happen. And in most cases, there’s not a good way to prevent them. Right. So I think our best goal is just to communicate that ability to communicate risk to have our monitoring station. So we’re trying, we have a prototype of a forecast system. So we incorporate data from our monitoring stations and data from precipitation models. And then the ideas we could have, or we do have a one day but then also develop a two day a three day outlook for when and where are landslides likely across the island. And so that’s also sort of a work in progress. But we can actually see the light at the end of the tunnel there. And so it would be that we we create this product, we make it available and then, you know, partners in either the weather service or emergency managers, if they want to use that information to to make announcements or to make plans, then then I think that would be great. And so I have to be very procedural and careful in the way that that gets carried out. And sort of how do people interpret this. Because you can imagine a forecast for landslides might, you know, be tricky the way to communicate? Right? Yeah, it’s not like a flood, you know, a flood is going to be in the floodplain. Right. And so there’s a there’s a very discreet zone. And, and that’s it. But landslides are more distributed, they’re more spread out than, then perhaps a flood or even a tsunami. Right. And tsunami tsunami map is you’ve got this sort of area around the coast, and you just get out of that area. Right. But but a landslide map, or you know, landslide situation is is much different. It’s not one specific spot, that you have to avoid it complicated, more complicated, I think.

Yeah.

LEO RIVERA 33:05
Yeah, I can imagine that.

BRAD NEWBOLD 33:06
With, with your work there in Puerto Rico, now, granted, you are specifically within a tropical environment. But we’re wondering about what, what are you doing now? And what have you been doing that then could be applied elsewhere? Could is it, is this something that’s, that’s is there a potential here for the work that you’re doing with the SILIDES PR projects that then could be applied elsewhere in tropical areas throughout the world? Or or other places? Is it something that could be applied back in North Carolina with with issues, you know, of potential landslides in, you know, Appalachians?

STEPHEN HUGHES 33:42
You know, what, what we’re doing with our monitoring stations is not not super complicated, just sort of involves a plan and what you want to get out of it. And so the same method could be applied anywhere, really. It depends, it depends what what that study area would be interested in. And so, you know, there’s a there’s an international group of folks called the, it’s called land aware, it’s the international sort of focus group on landslide early warning systems. And so we’ve learned over the past few years that there are many different types of landslide early warning systems globally, some are very simple. And they work great, some are more complicated, and and they, you know, maybe work just as good or maybe not as good.

LEO RIVERA 34:33
Yeah.

STEPHEN HUGHES 34:34
So I think each place is specific. And so if if, you know, if you’re worried about rainfall and do shallow soil landslides, then the approach that we’re using here is, is a great way to go and so, but if you’re worried about one large bedrock landslide, then you’d need a different approach. You need to be thinking about various site specific measurements and censoring. So I think it depends what your end goal is because, you know, we use this term landslides. And it’s a huge umbrella term that a lot of other things fit underneath. So I think yes, you could use the same approach that that we have going here, but it just, it depends on the place. And it depends what’s your what’s your ultimate goal would be.

LEO RIVERA 35:24
Yeah, I think something that’s really interesting about your approach versus some that I’ve heard, in other recent with other researchers that I’ve communicated with is, you know, you’re not trying to monitor a specific spot to capture data from a landslide in that spot, you’re just trying to collect data to better inform some of the conditions in the area, and what’s going on and leading to those landslides. And I think that’s a more much more easier to apply approach because it’s really hard to predict exactly where a landslide is going to occur. And right. And also, if your stations in a spot where a landslide does occur, when that does occur, that stations pretty much done. And so, [inaudible].

STEPHEN HUGHES 36:03
Go out in a blaze of glory, we hopefully have some really good data on on whatever, whatever happened. Yeah, we haven’t lost a station yet, we were very fortunate, none of ours have been swept away in a landslide, none of ours have been vandalized or damaged in any way. So, so far, so good.

LEO RIVERA 36:25
We live here in the palouse in eastern Washington, the environment here is really different from that of Puerto Rico. What are some of the challenges that you guys have with deploying and doing field work out there?

STEPHEN HUGHES 36:37
I think, yeah, you can imagine it mud, there’s a lot of mud, you know, we our last station, we installed I guess, about a month ago now. And, you know, while we were, you know, connecting all the wires, and setting the data logger, you know, just down poured on us. But, you know, it’s not that bad, especially, you know, I haven’t spent too much time and in eastern Washington, that’s, that’s a scab lands, right?

LEO RIVERA 37:05
Yeah we’re just beyond that. So the, this is the area that formed thanks to the scab lands where all the silt was deposited by wind so.

STEPHEN HUGHES 37:14
I imagine that access to private property and things like that are, are tricky, where you guys are, but here in Puerto Rico, you know, the access, and, you know, just the nature of the folks who own the land, they’re very welcoming. And so we’ve always had a really easy time. And, you know, we say, you know, from the University, and we’re interested in landslides and, and people, just, they’re very happy to collaborate with us and give us access to their, to their, you know, the lands that they have in it, and usually the places where we want to put monitoring equipment that they’re trying to avoid. Beacause its steep, you know, so that, that works out great. So people, you know, the weather, the weather can be an issue, but but also can’t complain.

LEO RIVERA 38:04
Yeah. No, that’s awesome.

BRAD NEWBOLD 38:06
I guess in our last few minutes here, you could put on your prognosticator hat or whatever. What does the future look like for landside research there in Puerto Rico? Elsewhere? What are you hoping to accomplish? What would you love to have? If you had you know, unlimited funds? You know, carte blanche, and all that. But what does that look like for you?

STEPHEN HUGHES 38:29
Right, yeah, I’d love to have unlimited funds and unlimited time, right? That will be also great. We’re trying to grow this landslide office. And so sometimes you want to I’m not very patient, I want to do things quick. And you know, but I think the sort of slow progress that we’ve made has been helpful to sort of work out some of the kinks with things to figure out, you know, better, better ways to, you know, to prepare, you know, forecasts or things like that. So, I think in the future, what I’d like is I’d like to have more people power. In Puerto Rico, there is no Geological Survey office, I think we’re feeling sort of a void, which I’m happy to do. And, you know, we’re at the were at state institution, which is, I think, good. And I think, like I mentioned, we have good partnerships and good partners, with many different groups. And, you know, just to sort of expand our people power, also keep pushing this idea of landslide ready to work more directly with municipality, especially emergency managers, other municipality level people, they’re really the ones where the rubber meets the road. And so yeah, I’d say those two things, just people power and more the landslide ready effort, and I think, I think we’re doing an okay job. And this is sort of going to be the rest of my career. I’m seeing that and I’m excited to take it as far as we can go.

BRAD NEWBOLD 39:56
That’s awesome.

LEO RIVERA 39:57
Yeah.

BRAD NEWBOLD 39:58
I guess everybody needs to get LiDAR surveys of their, their research areas, right, yeah.

STEPHEN HUGHES 40:04
I think you know, every every year there’s more and more and more, it’s absolutely incredible, the amount of LiDAR coverage yeah, in many different places around the world.

BRAD NEWBOLD 40:14
Yeah, I’ve been following yeah, along with archaeology, there’s been a lot of really cool stuff with LiDAR, especially there in, in Latin America and Central America and being able to uncover a lot of really cool things.

LEO RIVERA 40:26
Yeah, LiDAR’s a cool thing.

STEPHEN HUGHES 40:28
The only thing the only problem with LiDAR is that you want more LIDAR more and more.

BRAD NEWBOLD 40:33
That’s right our one meter resolution is not good enough, right?

LEO RIVERA 40:38
More, more surveys more yeah.

STEPHEN HUGHES 40:40
We need it every year, every year. We need to seed.

BRAD NEWBOLD 40:44
That’s right we need to see the change yep, yeah. Alright, anything else you’d like to share before we go?

STEPHEN HUGHES 40:52
I think that’s about it. So if anyone’s interested that listening, they can look up our webpage our webpage is just derrumbe.net so derumbe is the word for land. One of the words for landslide and Spanish, it’s D, E, R, R, U, M, B, E, so derrumbe.net and you’ll be able to see data from our monitoring station, or our landslide guide or our susceptibility maps, you know how to contact us or anything like that. So yeah, that’s, that’s good with me I appreciate it very much again, thank you both I appreciate it.

BRAD NEWBOLD 41:23
Yeah. No problem. Any final questions, Leo?

LEO RIVERA 41:27
No, I think you’ve we’ve about covered I haven’t I have one that’s not really related to this. And I’m just kind of curious you, in one of your publications, you man, I’m asking this because we teach environmental biophysics at the university here at WSU. And you you’re you’re one of our publications is the impact of lab style course times and teacher gender on course evaluations. And I’m just kind of curious as what what prompted that? And what if there were any interesting findings from that?

STEPHEN HUGHES 41:54
Well, I’d have to revisit that we’re not the first author. I think my grad school colleague, Catherine Riker was the was the lead on that. And so we were all we were in grad school at NC State. And we were all teaching intro labs for geology. So I’ll have to reread that. I remember that she had some very interesting results on those specific things related to the labs. And I love, I loved teaching the labs, because that’s sort of where you got to really try to convert people from other majors in radiology. And so I’d have to revisit that and get back to you on that.

LEO RIVERA 42:36
No, that’s great. I’ll have to look into that as well. I think that’s super cool. I actually teach the the lab for environmental biophysics. So I agree, it’s, it’s really fun to have that interaction with students. No, I think that’s, that’s super interesting.

BRAD NEWBOLD 42:50
Yeah. How has it been with you with balancing? Yeah, research and teaching? I don’t know, if we get to ask our guests too much of that we have a lot of guests in academia who, who have to do both? Or trying to do both? How has that been been working for you?

STEPHEN HUGHES 43:05
Right it’s, it depends how you want to go about things. I mean, so in my institution, if I wanted to be just full time teaching, they’d give me you know, X number of classes per semester, and I teach them and that’d be it. And so, once I move into the researcher, sphere, I need to sort of think differently, almost all of our funding for research at my institution is external funding, there is some support within the within the institution. But essentially, if you want to do research, you’re going to have to write proposals, you’re going to have to get those proposals funded. And, and go about it that way. And so it’s, it’s a lot different than teaching, you know, of course, there’s the actual research, but then there’s a lot of management and budgeting and forms and documents and all this kind of stuff. So I love it, I have a great time doing it. I especially love, you know, supporting students, undergrad, research students and graduate research students and, you know, sending them to conferences and working in labs and in the continent and stuff like that. So, yeah, that’s, that’s how that’s been good. So the way it works out is if if you get if you get external funds, then you can sort of move away a little bit from teaching, but I still teach one class per semester, and I also teach our, our summer field course, each year as well.

LEO RIVERA 44:33
Awesome.

BRAD NEWBOLD 44:34
Alright well, I think our time is up for today. Thanks again, Stephen, for being with us we really appreciate you taking the time to talk with us it’s been a fascinating conversation.

STEPHEN HUGHES 44:42
Of course, my pleasure. I hope we cross paths again.

BRAD NEWBOLD 44:46
And if you in the audience have any questions about this topic or want to hear more, feel free to contact us at metergroup.com or reach out to us on Twitter @meter_env and you can also view the full transcript from today in the podcast description that’s all for now, stay safe, and we’ll catch you next time on We Measure the World.