Typical displacement behaviours of slope movements

Understanding and quantifying the evolution of landslides are research topics that have always engaged researchers. Indeed, scientific literature provides a large number of contributions introducing and/or applying procedures, which are based on mechanical or phenomenological methods. The first ones are usually implemented to analyse the mechanical behaviour of a single complex phenomenon for which a consistent dataset is available. Phenomenological models are aimed at identifying common characteristics of landslides to be used for different purposes, such as forecasting the time of failure. This paper presents the implementation of a phenomenological model that allows the identification and quantification of well-defined dimensionless displacement trends for a large number of phenomena that are well documented in the literature. The analysed landslides involve different materials and are characterized by different stages of activity induced by seasonal and/or occasional triggering factors. The case studies include the well-known Vajont landslide, for which the obtained results show that the displacement trend was different from those usually characterizing occasionally reactivated landslides, since the beginning of the paroxysmal phase.