Proceedings of the 12th International INQUA meeting on paleoseismology, active tectonic and archaeoseismology

earthquakes (generally M≥5.5) contribute to better defining their relationship with the shallow-crust brittle strain and may provide useful information to sketch the complexity of the deformation, supporting the seismic source characterization. Documenting how a single earthquake contributes to the landform morpho-tectonic evolution advances our understanding of earthquakes' actions and impacts and, thus, improves the capability to estimate hazard. As a further positive outcome, informationon coseismic geological effects allows for the definition of more realistic seismic scenarios supporting land planning, emergency response activities, and risk residual assessment, which is crucial in the reconstruction phase. In addition, documenting the complexity of surface faulting caused by earthquakes enrich the worldwide dataset used to derive probabilistic models for fault displacement hazard analysis (e.g. Nurminen et al., 2022). Detailing such natural phenomena requires a prompt collection of perishable geological data, which must be systematically and homogeneously gathered as soon as possible. Scientific government/academic institutions in countries struck by extreme events such as earthquakes are often overwhelmed by the emergency. Therefore, it is vital to trigger external support in order to increase their response capacity. The relevance of these needs pushed the European earthquake researchers starting to collaborate in the field, sharing a coordinated survey approach and using a common methodology for the coseismic data collection. After the fruitful experiences following the 2016 Central Italy and 2020 Croatia earthquakes, the intention to build a structured and finalized specific European research task force became more concrete. The devastating earthquakes that hit Turkey in February 2023 have once again highlighted the need for the broad involvement of expert researchers to support the rapid emergency response. Soon after the event, the European Earthquake Geology Task Force (EuQuaGe) was created as a volunteer organization of Earth scientists from European governmental institutions and academia for rapid, effective, and coordinated assistance to national scientific institutions for acquiring detailed field observations, under the auspices of the EU Civil Protection Mechanism. The aims of the group include the implementation, curation, and sharing of coseismic surface data, along with the publication of comprehensive datasets, maps, and scientific papers (e.g., Civico et al., 2018; Villani et al., 2018; Baize et al., 2022).