State of the art of national landslide databases in Europe and their potential for assessing landslide susceptibility, hazard and risk

Abstract

A landslide inventory is the most important information source for quantitative zoning of landslide susceptibility, hazard and risk. It should give insight into the location, date, type, size, activity and causal factors of landslides as well as resultant damage. In Europe, many countries have created or are creating national and/or regional landslide databases (LDBs). Yet little is known on their contents, completeness, format, structure, language use and accessibility, and hence on their ability to perform national or transnational landslide zoning. Therefore, this study presents a detailed analysis of existing national LDBs in the EU member states, EU official candidate and potential candidate countries, and EFTA countries, and their possible use for landslide zoning. These national LDBs were compared with a subset of 22 regional databases. Twenty-two out of 37 contacted European countries currently have national LDBs, and six other countries have only regional LDBs. In total, the national LDBs contain 633,696 landslides, of which 485,004 are located in Italy, while Austria, the Czech Republic, France, Norway, Poland, Slovakia, and the UK also have > 10,000 landslides in their LDBs. National LDBs are generally created in the official language of each country and 58% of them contain other natural hazards (e.g. floods and sinkholes). About 68% of the LDBs contain less than 50% of all landslides in each country, but a positive observation is that 60% of the LDBs are updated at least once a year or after a major event. Most landslide locations are collected with traditional methods such as field surveys, aerial photo interpretation and analysis of historical records. Currently, integration of landslide information from different national LDBs is hampered because of differences in language and classification systems for landslide type and activity. Other problems are that currently only half of the national LDBs have a direct link between spatial and alphanumeric information, and that public access is generally restricted or limited. A minimum set of features to be included in national LDBs is suggested, and a flow chart is presented that classifies European countries by ability to perform national-scale landslide susceptibility, hazard and risk analyses.