Preliminary Canadian Landslide Database

This preliminary Canadian landslide database is a publicly available compilation of existing landslide inventories and original mapping. Version 14.0 of the database contains 31,005 entries of both landslide events (discrete recorded period of movement) and landslide features (slope with morphology consistent with past or ongoing movement). Landslide locations are provided as point features and include attributes for landslide type, material type (surficial, rock, ice, anthropogenic), point location type (headscarp, source, transport, deposit), qualitative location confidence (low, moderate, high), and an attribute for tracking the database version when an entry was last updated. Where available, additional attributes such as volume estimate, date of occurrence, trigger, contributing factors, interpreted historical interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR)-based displacement, and reference to previous work are also provided. Most landslides in the database have been identified using Google Earth and publicly available lidar. Online mapping applications such as HazMapper by Scheip and Wegman (2021) and Arctic Landscape EXplorer (ALEX) by Lübker et al. (2024) have also been used to identify landslides based on the changes in multi-spectral indices derived from satellite acquired datasets. As most of the landslides have been identified using remote sensing techniques (optical, multi-spectral, lidar, InSAR), landslide type attribution is considered preliminary, and no characterization of the current level of landslide activity or hazard are provided. The database spatial sampling biases includes detailed representation of areas with existing inventory and where lidar is available which allows for the identification of landslide features in forested terrain. Based on these limitations, the preliminary Canadian landslide database is appropriate for research projects and for use as part of the initial desktop review but must not solely be relied on for formal landslide hazard assessments. Version 14.0 includes the addition of 3,005 landslide features over version 13.0. Highlights of this version include the ongoing interpretation of InSAR-based deformation maps (NASA, 2025; NRCan 2025) to identify 726 slopes (up from 449 in version 13) with landslide morphology which were likely active with very slow displacement rates between 2016 and 2024. The recent availability of InSAR-based deformation information provides improved interpretation of slope processes that can be used to update landslide inventories and hazard characterizations. Nonetheless, InSAR techniques have limitations (e.g., Wu and Madson, 2024) and hazard characterization needs to consider the impact of radar wavelength, stack depth, processing algorithm, topography, vegetation, snow cover, satellite line-of-sight relative to slope movement, and rate of surface displacement. This means that large (> 100,000 m3), very slow (< 160 mm/year – Porter 2023), unvegetated, east-west moving landslide are preferentially captured in the InSAR data. As a result, the number of presently moving slopes in Canada with the potential to cause damage is significantly greater than captured in the database. The database entries with attributes recording interpreted historical InSAR-based deformation pattern are also derived from records that stopped in 2024 (NASA, 2025; NRCan 2025) or earlier (Choe et al. 2021). Their current state of activity/hazard needs to be confirmed based on site-specific investigations (field instrumentation and/or remote sensing). Another highlight includes the addition of a new attribute field to record the formation of a landslide dammed lake. Version 14 includes 789 present or breached landslide dammed lakes. Gullying, subsidence, and submarine landslides are compiled in a separate file as they are not typical subaerial landslide processes, but they can still represent a hazard to infrastructure. Point location and attribute data are provided as .csv file which can be imported in GIS software and as .kmz file for visualization using Google Earth. Summary statistics are provided in a separate spreadsheet. Summary statistics from previous versions are provided in the different spreadsheet tabs. Release notes from this and previous versions are compiled in an accompanying pdf document. References Choe, B.-H., Blais-Stevens, A., Samsonov, S., and Dudley, J., 2021. Sentinel-1 and RADARSAT Constellation Mission InSAR Assessment of Slope Movements in the Southern Interior of British Columbia, Canada. Remote Sensing, 13, Paper 3999, 17 p.Lübker T., Nitze I., Laboor S., Irrgang A., Lantuit H., and Grosse G., 2024: Presenting land surface changes through the web-based Arctic Landscape EXplorer (ALEX) to permafrost communities – a permafrost service. Proceedings of the International Conference on Permafrost (ICOP 2024), pp. 16-20 June 2024, Whitehorse (Canada).NASA. (2025). OPERA Surface Displacement from Sentinel-1 validated product (Version 1) [Data set]. NASA Alaska Satellite Facility Distributed Active Archive Center. https://doi.org/10.5067/SNWG/OPL3DISPS1-V1. Date Accessed: 2026-05-27.Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) 2025. Pilot national scale maps of active deformation processes in Canada. Government of Canada; Natural Resources Canada; Canada Centre for Mapping and Earth Observation (CCMEO). https://app.geo.ca/en-ca/map-browser/record/1da588c1-0dc6-45e4-9e63-9acf2fdc353a. Date Accessed: 2026-05-27.Porter, M., 2023. Predicting annual displacement probability of slow-moving landslides through Markov chain and Monte Carlo simulation. Proceedings of the 3rd JTC1 Workshop on Impact of Global Changes on Landslide Hazard and Risk, 4 p.Scheip, C. M., and Wegmann, K. W., 2021. HazMapper: a global open-source natural hazard mapping application in Google Earth Engine. Natural Hazards Earth System Sciences, 21, 1495–1511.Wu, Y.-Y., and Madson, A., 2024. Error sources of interferometric synthetic aperture radar satellites. Remote Sensing, 16, Paper 354.