DISASTER database on hydro-geomorphologic disasters in Portugal

In the last century, Portugal was affected by several natural disasters of hydrogeomorphologic origin that often caused high levels of destruction. However, data on past events related to floods and landslides were scattered. The DISASTER project created  a consistent and validated hydro-geomorphologic database for Portugal, by creating, disseminating and exploiting a GIS database on disastrous floods and landslides for the period 1865–2010, further updated until 2020.

Data collection was steered by the concept of disaster used within the DISASTER project. Therefore, any hydro-geomorphological case is stored in the database if the occurrence led to fatalities or injuries, and missing, evacuated or displaced people, independently of the number of people affected.

The sources of information are 16 national, regional and local newspapers that implied the analysis of 145,344 individual newspapers. The hydro-geomorphologic occurrences were stored in a database containing two major parts: the characteristics of the hydro-geomorphologic case and the corresponding damages. We provide the main results of the DISASTER database for the public.

Further details about the data collection and exploitation can be found in the following paper: 

Zêzere, J.L., Pereira, S., Tavares, A.O. et al. DISASTER: a GIS database on hydro-geomorphologic disasters in Portugal. Natural Hazards 72, 503–532 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-013-1018-y

We provide a shapefile with the location of the hydro-geomorphological hazard for the period 1865-2020 for mainland Portugal and additional details about the hydrogeomorphological hazard type and subtype, date of occcurrence, year, month, day, hour, georeferencing quality, source, source date, source type, page in the source, number of human damages (fatalities, injured, evaciated, displaced and missing people), district, municipality and parish.

Also, we provide a word document with the database codes description.