Rock Glacier Inventories (RoGI) in 12 areas worldwide using a multi-operator consensus-based procedure

The Rock Glacier Inventories and Kinematics community (RGIK) has defined standards for generating Rock Glacier Inventories (RoGI). In the framework of the European Space Agency Climate Change Initiative for Permafrost (ESA CCI Permafrost), we set up a multi-operator mapping exercise in 12 areas around the World. Each RoGI team was composed of five to ten operators, involving 41 persons in total. Each operator performed similar steps following the RGIK guidelines and using a similar QGIS tool. The individual results were compared and combined after common meetings to agree on the final consensus-based solutions. In total, 337 “certain” rock glaciers have been identified and characterised, and 222 additional landforms have been identified as “uncertain” rock glaciers.The dataset consists of three GeoPackage files for each area: 1) the Primary Markers (PM) locating and characterising the identified Rock Glacier Units (RGU), 2) the Moving Areas (MA) delineating areas with surface movement associated with the rock glacier creep, based on spaceborne Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR), and 3) the Geomorphological Outlines (GO) delineating the restricted and extended RGU boundaries. Here we describe the content, structure, and naming convention of the final PM/MA/GO dataset. The RoGI guidelines, the GeoPackage (gpkg) templates for performing similar RoGI in other areas, and exercises based on the QGIS tool are available on the RGIK website.

Funding: The initiative is funded by the European Space Agency Permafrost Climate Change Initiative (ESA CCI Permafrost, contract 4000123681/18/I-NB). The work of the Rock Glacier Inventories and Kinematics (RGIK) community has been supported by the International Permafrost Association (IPA), GCOS Switzerland, and SwissUniversities.