Paper of interest: Volcano monitoring in Latin America: taking a step forward

The new special issue of the open-access journal Volcanica, Vol. 4, No. S1, Volcano Observatories in Latin America is available in both English and Spanish and is a collaborative effort of the Asociación Latinoamericana de Volcanología (ALVO; ALVO Oficial). The special issue contains many manuscripts of interest to the hazard mapping and hazard assessment community. Descriptions of monitoring and hazard assessment practices in each country can be found in the special issue.

Of particular note for the hazard mapping community is the preface to the special issue: “Volcano monitoring in Latin America: taking a step forward” by Forte et al. (2021), which gives an overview of Latin American volcano monitoring agencies and their activities, including a discussion of the development of Latin American hazard maps through time. Included with the paper is a supplementary dataset of 153 Latin American hazard map references from 1978-2021. This dataset was extremely useful for finding and adding Latin American maps to the Volcanic Hazard Maps Database.

Figure 3 reproduced from Forte et al. (2021): Published volcanic hazard maps for the Latin American volcanoes. The vertical bars show the number of hazard maps published per year. The solid black curve represents the cumulative number of hazard maps published, while the dashed line shows the cumulative number of published hazard maps, but excluding updates (i.e. number of volcanoes with hazard maps). For details about references used to build this figure, see the Supplementary Material (EN).

Full paper citation:

Forte, P., Rodríguez, L., Jácome Paz, M. P., Caballero García, L., Alpízar Segura, Y., Bustos, E., Perales Moya, C., Espinoza, E., Vallejo, S. and Agusto, M. (2021) “Volcano monitoring in Latin America: taking a step forward : Preface to Special Issue on Volcano Observatories in Latin America”, Volcanica, 4(S1), p. vii – xxxiii. doi: 10.30909/vol.04.S1.viixxxiii.