U.S. Landslide Inventory and Susceptibility Map
Landslides are a damaging, disruptive, and potentially deadly geologic hazard. While landslides occur in every U.S. State, their impacts are often a localized and episodic phenomenon, plus landslide types and triggering mechanisms vary widely across the country. Our understanding of current and future landslide problems is based on observations of past slope failures, and these data on landslide occurrence differ greatly in terms of quality, accessibility, and extent. The contrasting and inconsistent data present a challenge to developing a nation-wide picture of these hazards. To address this, the USGS focuses on identifying and understanding landslide activity, compiling existing landslide inventories, and developing tools to predict landslide occurrence and potential across the U.S. In particular, the two products described and linked here in our interactive online map are the national landslide inventory compilation (Mirus et al., 2020) and the national landslide susceptibility map (refer to Mirus et al., 2024).
Landslide inventories document the position and other supporting information, which serves as the foundational data for scientific research on landslides, as well as risk reduction efforts. Landslide mapping and the corresponding inventories are managed by different agencies and institutions, with varied objectives, so they are typically associated within specific jurisdictional boundaries and information are often recorded in disparate formats. The USGS aims to overcome this issue by compiling a nation-wide landslide inventory and making it openly accessible to everyone through an online interactive map. The database itself (Belair et al., 2022) includes digital inventories created by both USGS and non-USGS authors and integrates these available geospatial data into a uniform and consistent format. Given the wide range of landslide information sources, we provide an attribute to assess the relative confidence in the characterization of the location and extent of each landslide, which are shown in grayscale on the interactive map. Further details about each landslide and more recent information (when it exists) can be accessed by clicking the “more information” attribute, which also links users to the original source of the landslide information (whenever available). This database was first compiled in 2019 and most recently updated in 2022, but it will continue to be updated intermittently as new landslides are mapped and existing inventories are identified or digitized. Please contact gs-haz_landslides_inventory@usgs.gov for more information on how to contribute additional inventories to this community effort.
Landslide susceptibility models are typically developed using inventories to show where landslides are more and less likely based on a selection of different terrain attributes. Maps of landslide susceptibility can be useful for risk-reduction and land-use planning, and have been developed locally for a few areas of the U.S. where the landslide risks are particularly high. However, there are many other areas of the country with limited understanding of landslide potential in need of tools to assess hazardous areas. Previous attempts to map landslide susceptibility across the contiguous United States and globally are not detailed enough and tend to underestimate the hazard in moderately sloping terrain (refer to Mirus et al., 2020). Regrettably, these gently sloping areas are where most development and infrastructure are exposed to landslides, so an improved and more detailed nationwide map is needed. To do this, we use USGS high-resolution digital-elevation data (3DEP) and many hundreds-of-thousands of landslides from the inventory compilation (Belair et al., 2022) to test different modeling approaches. Ultimately, we developed a parsimonious non-linear relation between topographic slope (at 10 m) and local relief (within the surrounding 100 x 100 m), to produce a high-resolution map (90 x 90 m) of landslide susceptibility for the entire U.S. and Puerto Rico. Regrettably, other U.S. territories did not have the appropriate combination of high-resolution digital elevation data and landslide positional data to be included in our efforts at the time of our analysis. The color-scale of the interactive online map shows increasing landslide susceptibility (from yellow to red), whereas negligible landslide susceptibility is shown by areas without any colored shading. Refer to the journal article (Mirus et al., 2024) for a detailed description of the susceptibility model used to produce this map, and download the geographic information system (GIS) database at the USGS ScienceBase repository (Belair et al., 2024).
Related Content
National Landslide Hazards Maps (NLHM)
Integrating Disparate Spatial Datasets from Local to National Scale for Open-Access Web-Based Visualization and Analysis: A Case Study Compiling U.S. Landslide Inventories
Parsimonious landslide susceptibility modeling at continental scales: a new high-resolution national landslides map
Landslide susceptibility maps are a fundamental tool for risk reduction. We used the USGS's landslide inventory compilation (N=613,724), high-resolution 3DEP digital elevation model (~10-m), and high-performance computing resources (YETI), to develop a new nation-wide susceptibility map for the Continental U.S., Hawaii, Alaska, and Puerto Rico.
Related Content
National Landslide Hazards Maps (NLHM)
Integrating Disparate Spatial Datasets from Local to National Scale for Open-Access Web-Based Visualization and Analysis: A Case Study Compiling U.S. Landslide Inventories
Parsimonious landslide susceptibility modeling at continental scales: a new high-resolution national landslides map
Landslide susceptibility maps are a fundamental tool for risk reduction. We used the USGS's landslide inventory compilation (N=613,724), high-resolution 3DEP digital elevation model (~10-m), and high-performance computing resources (YETI), to develop a new nation-wide susceptibility map for the Continental U.S., Hawaii, Alaska, and Puerto Rico.