A study published in Scientific Reports by Nature has examined how satellite-measured ground movement in southwestern Cyprus relates to landslide activity class and the geological, geomorphological, environmental and geotechnical factors behind it. The research team, drawn from the University of Cyprus in Nicosia and Italy's Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia in Rome, used radar interferometry to measure ground velocities across landslides already recorded in an existing inventory. According to Nature, the work is the first to statistically correlate those movement rates with causal factors in this part of the island.
The paper appears in Scientific Reports and was published on 11 October 2026. Its authors are P. Tzampoglou, D. Loukidis, C. Tolomei and colleagues.
Why it matters
Landslides are a recurring hazard in Cyprus, and knowing which slopes are moving fastest — and why — shapes how authorities prioritise monitoring and mitigation. The study's central finding is that once a landslide has started moving, the pace of that movement is governed mainly by how much rain falls, not by the geological and geotechnical properties of the ground. Those properties still determine where landslides occur in the first place, but they are poor predictors of how quickly a slope will shift after failure begins.
That distinction matters for early warning. If rainfall is the dominant control on velocity, then precipitation records and forecasts become the most useful short-term signal for anticipating accelerated ground movement, while geological mapping remains the tool for identifying which areas are vulnerable at all.
How the measurements were made
The researchers relied on Multi-Temporal Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar, or MT-InSAR, a technique that compares radar images of the same ground taken at different times to detect millimetre-scale displacement. Because the satellite's line of sight is oblique, the team worked with datasets from both ascending and descending orbits, giving them two viewing geometries over the same terrain.
They then compared the resulting ground velocities against the landslide inventory for southwestern Cyprus, separating the sites into active, dormant and relict categories. The pattern was consistent: the highest line-of-sight velocities appeared in landslides classified as active, with dormant slides moving less and relict slides least of all. In other words, the satellite measurements broadly agreed with the on-the-ground classification of how alive each landslide is.
Weak rocks, wet ground
The largest displacement rates clustered on outcrops of fine-grained clastic rocks — marls, radiolarian mudstones and mélange. Nature reports that the authors attribute this to the low shear strength of these materials, which deform more readily than stronger rock types under the same conditions.
To work out which factors mattered most, the team applied Shapley Additive Explanations, a method borrowed from machine learning that assigns each input variable a share of the credit for a model's output. Rainfall emerged as the leading influence on increases in line-of-sight velocity.
Two geotechnical measures showed weaker relationships. The Plasticity Index, which describes how much a fine-grained soil changes volume with water content, generally rose alongside velocity. The Geological Strength Index, a measure of rock mass quality, showed only a slight tendency to fall as velocity increased — a weak negative correlation rather than a strong one.
The authors' conclusion, as reported by Nature, is that geological and geotechnical characteristics are decisive in bringing landslide phenomena into being, but that precipitation height predominantly governs the rate of movement once a slide is under way.
Data, funding and access
The study drew on geological and geotechnical data supplied by Zomenia Zomeni, Niki Koulermou and Pantelitsa Koudouna of the Geological Survey Department of Cyprus, whom the authors thank in the paper. Funding came from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme through a Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant, agreement number 101027880.
The article is open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence, which permits sharing and adaptation with appropriate credit. Springer Nature states that it remains neutral regarding jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
The full citation is Tzampoglou, P., Loukidis, D., Tolomei, C. et al., "Correlating InSAR-derived ground movement rates with landslide activity class and causal factors: a case study from Cyprus," Scientific Reports (2026), DOI 10.1038/s41598-026-74387-6.
What to watch
The immediate question is whether rainfall-driven velocity thresholds can be turned into operational warning criteria for Cypriot slopes — and whether the same statistical approach, applied to other Mediterranean terrains with similar weak sedimentary rocks, produces comparable results.
