DOI: 10.5066/p9nj8msp
title: Hurricane Maria's Most Mobile (MMM) landslides in nine study areas in the Lares, Naranjito and Utuado Municipalities, Puerto Rico

description: In 2017, Hurricane Maria triggered widespread landsliding in Puerto Rico. Published landslide inventories from Hurricane Maria (Bessette-Kirton and others, 2019; Baxstrom and others, 2021a, 2021b; Einbund and others, 2021a, 2021b) provided detailed mapping, including 2919 locations of headscarp points, travel distance lines, source areas, and landslide-affected areas (combined source and runout) in Lares, Naranjito and Utuado muncipalities. Landslide types included slumps, debris flows, rock falls, and other slope failures. We developed criteria to extract a subset of these published landslide-affected areas representative of Hurricane Maria’s most mobile (MMM) channelized debris flows. MMM were used for topographic characterization of channelized runout zones and assessment of predictive success of debris-flow inundation modeling (Brien and others, 2024). We selected MMM based on two characteristics (Brien and others, 2024): 1) >40% of the runout area within ~5 m of a channel network derived from a 1-m digital elevation model and 2) runout length >100 m.

This data release includes four shapefiles, divided by municipality and lithology, containing 124 unique landslide-affected areas:

NaranjitoMMM.shp – MMM from one study area in Naranjito municipality
LaresMMM.shp - MMM in from three study areas in Lares municipality
Utuado_sedsMMM.shp – MMM from one study area in Utuado municipality, sedimentary terrane
Utuado_intrusivesMMM.shp – MMM from four study areas in Utuado municipality, intrusive granodiorite terrane

References:
Baxstrom, K.W., Einbund, M.M., Schulz, W.H., 2021a, Map data from landslides triggered by Hurricane Maria in a section of Naranjito, Puerto Rico, U.S. Geological Survey data release, https://doi.org/10.5066/P9GBGA4I.

Baxstrom, K.W., Einbund, M.M., Schulz, W.H., 2021b, Map data from landslides triggered by Hurricane Maria in the greater karst region of northwest Puerto Rico, U.S. Geological Survey data release, https://doi.org/10.5066/P9YYU7W1.

Bessette-Kirton, E.K., Coe, J.A., Kelly, M.A., Cerovski-Darriau, C., Schulz, W.H., 2019, Map data from landslides triggered by Hurricane Maria in four study areas of Puerto Rico. U.S. Geological Survey data release, https://doi.org/10.5066/P9OW4SLX.

Brien, D.L., Reid, M.E.,Cronkite-Ratcliff C., Perkins J.P., 2024 [in review], Topographic controls on landslide mobility: Modeling hurricane-induced landslide runout and debris-flow inundation in Puerto Rico, Nat. Hazards Earth Syst. Sci. Discuss. [preprint], https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-2024-141.

Einbund, M.M., Baxstrom, K.W., Schulz, W.H., 2021a, Map data from landslides triggered by Hurricane Maria in three study areas in the Lares Municipality, Puerto Rico: U.S. Geological Survey data release, https://doi.org/10.5066/P9EASZZ7.

Einbund, M.M., Baxstrom, K.W., Schulz, W.H., 2021b, Map data from landslides triggered by Hurricane Maria in four study areas in the Utuado Municipality, Puerto Rico: U.S. Geological Survey data release, https://doi.org/10.5066/P9ZNUR1P.