Description
Landslides can cause major human and economic losses, taking lives while damaging infrastructure and private property. Understanding the areas susceptible to landslides can help mitigate this risk. This dataset is a static historical baseline quantifying the categorical susceptibility of the local terrain to landslides for all global land regions.
Technical Description
The landslide susceptibility map was developed to show where the terrain is most susceptible to landslides. The susceptibility model considers whether roads have been built, trees have been cut down or burned, a major tectonic fault is nearby, the local bedrock is weak, and/or the hillsides are steep.
This map includes elevation data collected by the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM). The forest loss nformation comes from a Landsat-based record of forest change (Hanson et al.). Neither dataset was available in 2007 when an earlier version of this map was published. Faults are from the Geological Map of the World, 3rd edition (Bouysse 2009). Roads are from OpenStreetMap.
This dataset contains the following fields:
- landslide_risk_class: A categorical indicator for the potential for landslides at the specified location. Values range from 1 to 5 describing landslide susceptibility, where 1 is Very Low, 2 is Low, 3 is Moderate, 4 is High, and 5 is Very High Susceptibility.