About

This project builds a reproducible, harmonized inventory for mass movement data in Austria. By curating multiple open data sets, a single PostGIS data base is provided.

WARNING

This project is under active development. The data base schema and its records are subject to change.

Project Goal

Austria has various data sets on mass movements, but they are often maintained in different formats and silos by various institutes and regional authorities. This fragmentation makes comprehensive, large-scale analysis difficult.

This project aims to solve that problem by providing a single, harmonized and reproducible data base of mass movement events in Austria, specifically for the research community.

Scope & Limitations

This data set is a research-oriented tool. It is designed to support exploratory analysis, statistical modeling and the development of new methods.

What to Expect

• Harmonized data: Historic mass movement events aggregated from multiple public sources.
• Attributes: Records include event date, harmonized event classifications and point geometry. Where available, metadata is provided.
• Duplicate handling: To reduce redundancy across sources, an automated process identifies potential duplicates using a 500-meter radius and same-day event date.
• Provenance: Each record links back to its original source, ensuring traceability and proper attribution.
• Two data formats: The data is provided as a ready-to-use GeoPackage for quick exploration and a PostGIS data base for reproducible ingestion and advanced workflows.
• Quick Start: This project serves as a practical resource for researchers who need a consolidated data set for analysis, modeling or method testing.
• Transparency: Due to the open-source nature of the project, code for data ingestion, harmonization and de-duplication is comprehensible and documented which enables inspection, reproducibility and reuse.

Important Limitations

• Not comprehensive: Events can be missing! This inventory is a best-effort aggregation of known public data sources and most likely will never be exhaustive.
• Not error-free: This inventory inherits all inconsistencies, inaccuracies and omissions from its sources. Be aware, that data quality can verify.
• Positional uncertainty: Point geometries can be imprecise. Positional uncertainty is generally not reported by the sources and can not be reliably estimated. Do not use for high-accuracy applications.
• Imperfect duplicate detection: The automated check helps reduce redundancy but is not exhaustive. Some duplicates may remain, especially considering imprecision regarding point geometries.
• Not for real-time use: Updates depend on upstream sources. Data refreshes are irregular and not guaranteed, new event data can lag or be incomplete. Check the source metadata for recency.

Data Coverage

The data base encompasses different mass movement phenomena, including:

• Gravity slide or flow
• Rockfall
• Mass movement (undefined)
• Deep‑seated rock slope deformation
• Collapse / sinkhole

Getting Started

Quick Access (GeoPackage)

For users who want to quickly explore the data without setting up a data base, we provide a ready-to-use GeoPackage file. This is ideal for:

• Quick data exploration and visualization
• One-time analyses or prototyping
• Users without data base management experience

TIP

The GeoPackage dump contains a single table with all events and is located in the repository's db-dump/ directory. Simply download and open it in your favorite GIS application.

PostGIS Setup

For a proper workflow with reproducible data pipelines, advanced querying and integration into existing infrastructure, we recommend deploying the full PostGIS data base using Docker.

To set up the data base, please refer to the Quick Start Guide.

Data Sources

The inventory incorporates data from the following sources:

Source Name	License
GeoSphere	CC BY 4.0
Global Fatal Landslides	Open Government License
NASA COOLR	Custom License (provided in the repo)
WLV	No Limitations
Land Kärnten (Carinthia)	CC BY 4.0

Each record in the data base is linked to its original source to ensure clear data provenance and proper attribution.

We are continuously working on adding more data sources to enhance the comprehensiveness of the inventory.

Attributions

Website icon by Icons8

License

This project is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.