Export to
Wednesday, September 17, 2025 at 9:10pm and last updated
Monday, February 23, 2026 at 12:12pm.
PDXOSGeo February Meetup
Description
PDXOSGeo connects again this week, Wednesday February 25, 6:30p Hot Lips Pizza @ the Natural Capital Center 721 NW 9th Ave, Portland OR. Join us for some show and tell and good open geo discussion!
This month we will be discussing Landslide Susceptibility Modeling With Information Theory: The Terroir of Landslides, with David Percy, aka "Percy". Percy is preparing to defend his dissertation on Spatial Reconstructability Analysis, and led us in in a lively discussion in January. This month he will share another aspect of his work on applying Reconstructability Analysis (RA) to categorical raster datasets.
RA is a form of machine learning algorithm (MLA) that works exclusively with discrete data, so categorical data such as the variables in the SSURGO soils database, the geologic database (DOGAMI), and land cover (NLCD) can be used as inputs in their native format without conversion to dummy variables, as is typically done in other MLAs.
For his February demo, Percy will show how these variables are used along with topographic data to model landslide susceptibility in two of the counties ranked highest by FEMA for most landslide hazards: Lincoln and Tillamook. Percy will show that there is evidence to suggest that we can map a Terroir of Landslides, using combinations of soil type, geology, elevation,and terrane group, similar to the combinations of environmental factors that are used to characterize wines, chocolate, and coffee. Results will be presented that show how these data are useful in making hazard maps.
All of the extraction for analysis was done in QGIS and Python using open source GIS libraries Shapely and Rasterio. Code will be shared and discussed!
Join us Wednesday for a lively discussion!