About
Austria has various inventories on mass movements, but they are often maintained in different formats and silos across institutes and regional authorities. This fragmentation makes large-scale analysis difficult.
This project addresses that by providing a single, harmonized and reproducible PostGIS database of mass movement events in Austria, built from multiple open data sets and designed as a research-oriented tool.
WARNING
This project is under active development. The database schema and its records are subject to change.
Limitations
The database is a best-effort aggregation of open data sets. Be aware of the following limitations before using it.
DANGER
- Not comprehensive: Events can be missing. This inventory is an aggregation of known public data sources and will never be exhaustive.
- Not error-free: This database inherits all inconsistencies, inaccuracies and omissions from its sources. Data quality can vary.
- Temporal uncertainty: Every record carries a timestamp, but most sources only report the event date, in those cases the time is set to midnight. Temporal uncertainty is generally not reported by the sources. Hence, treat all timestamps as approximate and account for this uncertainty in any time-sensitive analysis.
- Positional uncertainty: Most records have no positional uncertainty reported at all. GeoSphere Austria, the primary base data set, is an exception and documents an uncertainty of 50–2000 m.
- Imperfect duplicate detection: Duplicates are identified using a 2 km spatial radius and same-day event date (ignoring the timestamp). The radius is driven by GeoSphere Austria's maximum positional uncertainty. Considering the temporal and spatial uncertainty, duplicates may remain.
- 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.
Data Coverage
The database 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
For users who want to quickly explore the data without setting up a database, we provide a ready-to-use GeoPackage file. This is ideal for:
- Quick data exploration and visualization
- One-time analyses or prototyping
- Users without database 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 database using Docker.
To set up the database, please refer to the Quick Start Guide.
Data Sources
The inventory incorporates data from the following sources:
| Source Name | License | Last Updated |
|---|---|---|
| GeoSphere Austria | CC BY 4.0 | 25 Nov 2025 |
| Global Fatal Landslides | Open Government License | 9 Sept 2019 |
| NASA COOLR | Custom License (provided in the repo) | unknown |
| WLV | No Limitations | 19 Feb 2026 |
| Land Kärnten (Carinthia) | CC BY 4.0 | 6 Dec 2025 |
Each data source listed above contributes records to the inventory while maintaining full traceability to the original source. The Last Updated column indicates the most recent modification date for each source, helping users assess data recency.
Additional sources are evaluated continuously to expand the inventory's coverage.
Attributions
Website icon by Icons8
License
This project is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Financial Support
This work has been funded by Land Tirol.
Project: DigiSchutz
