DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.7089351
title: Preliminary Canadian Landslide Database

description: This preliminary Canadian landslide database is a publicly available compilation of existing landslide inventories and original mapping. Version 13.0 of the database contains 28,000 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 should be 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 should not solely be relied on for formal landslide hazard assessments. 

Version 13.0 includes the addition of 2,500 landslide features over version 12.0. Highlights of this version include the addition of Rick Guthrie and Jason Goetz, (landslide from Vancouver Island), and Andrée Blais-Stevens (landslides from Alaska Highway and Sea-to-Sky Highway) as co-authors. Another highlight of version 13.0 of the database is the ongoing interpretation of InSAR-based deformation maps (NASA, 2025; NRCan 2025) to identify 449 slopes 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 expected to be 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).

Gullying, subsidence, and submarine landslides are now compiled in a separate file as they are not typical subaerial slope 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.