The development and application of China national landslide database and information system

Abstract

Landslide caused significant damage to people and economical properties. Establishing a comprehensive landslide database is a fundamental task to support landslide mitigation. However, numerous challenges such as non-standardized data collection, inefficient data maintenance, discontinuous data update, and insufficient data service have become the major problems to establish a reliable, dynamic, and comprehensive landslide database. After two decades of development, more than 322,000 landslide events have been collected through professional field surveys, routine field inspections, and public reporting into the China national landslide database. Also, an information system, which was primarily built for data dynamic management, field data acquisition and integration, classified data storage, efficient data processing, real-time statistics, and information services have been achieved. In this paper, the China national landslide database and information system, including the development progress, database architecture, data services, and future developments, are introduced in details. The key considerations and experiences obtained through the development of China national landslide database and information system such as the establishment of massive landslide inventory data acquisition standardization process, comprehensive mechanism of data quality control and dynamic maintenance, services of landslide information system could be helpful for any other countries or regions that also greatly suffering from landslides, and contribute to the improvement of landslide risk reduction in the world.