earthquake-db: Historical Earthquake Database of the Dead Sea Transform Region

earthquake-db is an open geospatial research database and interactive GIScience platform for the study of historical earthquakes in the Dead Sea Transform (DST) region and adjacent parts of the Levant and eastern Mediterranean. The project integrates historical earthquake events, documented damage, and environmental effects in a standardized, versioned, and openly available framework designed to support reproducible spatial analysis, historical interpretation, and long-term seismic research. Project objectives. The project pursues five complementary objectives: Building a geospatial database. Develop a standardized geospatial database integrating historical earthquake events, documented damage, and environmental effects into a unified GIScience framework. Improving historical earthquake records. Refine and harmonize documentary, archaeological, and paleoseismic evidence to enhance the spatial, temporal, and descriptive consistency of historical earthquake records across the Levant. Enabling spatial analysis of earthquake effects. Provide a robust platform for investigating the spatial distribution of earthquake damage and environmental effects, supporting analyses of seismic patterns, landscape responses, and regional vulnerability. Supporting open and reproducible research. Promote transparent and interdisciplinary research through standardized data structures, interactive geospatial visualization, open-access datasets, and reproducible analytical workflows. Bridging past and future seismic risk. Improve understanding of long-term seismic behaviour by integrating historical evidence into research on seismic hazards, environmental change, disaster resilience, and risk assessment. Dataset and research infrastructure. The database brings together heterogeneous evidence dispersed across historical catalogues, documentary sources, archaeological publications, geological and palaeoseismological studies, and environmental-effect inventories. These materials are represented in a standardized relational and geospatial structure linking earthquake events, named sites, reported damage observations, and environmental earthquake effects. The data model preserves source-level distinctions while enabling comparison, filtering, aggregation, mapping, and statistical analysis across records that differ in chronology, spatial precision, evidential basis, and confidence. Dataset components. The release contains: (1) an earthquake-event catalogue for the DST region; (2) a geographic gazetteer of historical, archaeological, and modern sites; (3) a harmonized table of earthquake-damage observations; (4) a harmonized table of environmental earthquake effects; (5) documentation describing the database and map-oriented data fields; (6) data-integrity and quality-assurance outputs; and (7) a reproducible statistical-analysis notebook. Existing CSV filenames are retained to support stable downstream use and version comparison. Evidence and uncertainty. Historical earthquake records are not treated as equivalent to modern instrumental observations. Individual entries may reflect different source traditions, degrees of chronological resolution, location certainty, interpretation, and scholarly reliability. Confidence information is therefore retained as an explicit analytical attribute. Users should evaluate records in relation to their original sources, the documented harmonization decisions, and the intended scale of analysis. The database is a research infrastructure for critical analysis and does not by itself constitute a complete probabilistic seismic-hazard model. Version 1.2.0. This release expands the interactive web-mapping interface with a second, earthquake-specific map view. Users can select an earthquake event, filter the event list by event Confidence, and explore the associated earthquake-damage and environmental-effect records with event-level statistics and independent layer controls. The release also adds iframe-friendly Embed Mode through ?embed=1, allowing the map application to be integrated into external sites while retaining the standalone deployment. Version 1.2.0 also updates compatibility with the expanded v_damage_dst_unified.csv schema. The Refrences and Links fields are exposed in damage popups and tooltips in both map views. Valid HTTP/HTTPS link values are rendered as safe clickable links, while non-URL identifiers remain plain text. Local CSS and JavaScript assets use versioned query parameters to reduce stale-cache problems in GitHub Pages and embedded deployments. Version 1.2.0 data counts. The validated release candidate contains 1,000 sites, 389 earthquake events, 1,297 earthquake-damage records, and 241 environmental-effect records. Final pre-release functional QA found no release-blocking regression. Visual and responsive design refinement is intentionally deferred to later versions. Open access and associated resources. The complete code and version history are maintained in the GitHub repository. The project website and interactive maps provide browser-based exploration of the database. Associated damage and environmental-effect items can also be explored through the digital collection at the Younes and Soraya Nazarian Library, University of Haifa. The repository is archived by release in Zenodo so that specific versions can be cited and reproduced. Reproducibility and reuse. Researchers should cite the specific archived version used, retain the original field meanings and provenance, and report any filtering, reclassification, geocoding, aggregation, or uncertainty-treatment decisions applied in derived analyses. Contributions, corrections, and source-based amendments are welcome through the project repository.