European Landslide Susceptibility Map

The Classified European Landslide Susceptibility map v1.0 (1 km x 1 km resolution) covers 26 EU member states, Norway and Switzerland as well as the non-EU Balkan countries (Cyprus and Iceland are not yet covered due to lack of input data).

Landslide susceptibility is the likelihood of a landslide to occur in an area controlled by local terrain conditions. It is the degree to which a terrain can be affected by future slope movements. Susceptibility does not consider the temporal probability of failure or the magnitude of the expected events. With this respect, landslide susceptibility evaluations differ from landslide hazard. It also differs from risk assessments which estimate potential landslide damage

The Europe-wide spatial landslide susceptibility assessment is actually the result of 7 regionally different landslide susceptibility maps created for 7 different climato-physiographic regions (coastal zones, plains with arid and temperate climate with dry summer, plains with temperate climate without dry period, plains with cold climate without dry season and with warm summer, plains with cold climate with cold summer, mountains with arid, temperate climate and mountains with polar and cold climate).

For each region the same model approach (spatial multicriteria evaluation, SMCE) was used to establish and combine relative weights of parameter set classes (i.e. classified slope gradient, soil parent material and land cover) for calculation of susceptibility index rasters. These parameter sets are also made available as auxiliary spatial data products. The respective metadata of each of these maps provides additional information about the source data and classification/aggregation systems applied.

In order to calibrate the spatial models, and to evaluate and classify the region-specific landslide susceptibility indices, more than 100,000 georeferenced landslides from more than 22 European countries were collected by BGR and JRC from national and regional databases held by different institutions. The region-specific continuous susceptibility indices were classified into five classes (very high, high, moderate, low, and very low) based on landslide frequency (50%, 25%, 15%, 7%, 3%, respectively). The compound map was obtained through spatial merging of the region-specific classified maps. More detailed susceptibility assessments are recommended at least for the high and very high susceptibility classes. In some areas they might also be necessary for moderate susceptibility classes.

Uncertainties/Sensitivity: This product is accompanied by a confidence level map; it contains the estimated quality/reliability of the classified susceptibility map. The Classified European Landslide Susceptibility seems to be quite sensitive to the low resolution and semantic inconsistencies of the input data layers, especially that of the soil parent material map.