DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.10581762
title: A Global Map of Gullied Hillslopes on Mars

description: This dataset is associated with the 2024 Icarus publication: 'A global map of gullied hillslopes' by Noblet A., Conway S. J. and Osinski G. R.. Martian gullies are geologically recent landforms that resemble terrestrial gullies. The distribution of gullies on Mars has been used to support different modes of formation involving CO2, H2O or entirely dry processes.

This dataset contains a global map of gullied hillslopes on Mars. The gullied hillslopes were digitized as polygons, using a Context camera (CTX) mosaic as basemap. The geographic coordinate system is Mars2000 (#WKID 104905). 

Version 1 of the database contains 7,846 gullied hillslopes features and 7 field in the attribute table. Following is a description of each field: 



OBJECTID: Index number of the gullied hillslope polygon.

HarrisonID: Corresponding index number of the site previously identified by Harrison et al. (2015). A value of 99999 corresponds to gullied hillslopes that were not identified in this previous study.

CRATER_ID: If the gullied hillslope polygon is within a crater identified by Robbins and Hynek (2012), this field corresponds to the corresponding CRATER_ID field from their catalog.

Centr_Long: Longitude of the centroid of the polygon, in decimal degrees.

Centr_Lat: Latitude of the centroid of the polygon, in decimal degrees.

HiRISE_cov: HiRISE coverage of the gullied hillslope. This field is set to ‘YES’ if the gullied hillslope polygon intersects the footprint of an HiRISE observation, to ‘NO’ otherwise. This field is calculated using the HiRISE coverage shapefile from April 2023. 


GG_Aspect_Gradient_stats.txt  contains the comma separated values of aspect and gradient statistics of the mapped gullied hillslopes. These values were derived from Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA) (Smith et al., 1999) gridded products at 463m/px. Each line in the file represents one MOLA pixel that is included in a gullied hillslope polygon.

 

Version 2 is linked to the release of the 2025 EPSL article 'Mapping gully-susceptible hillslopes on Mars: implications for their mode of formation and evolution' by Noblet A., Osinski G. R. and Conway S. J.. This updated catalog includes 8,200 gullied hillslopes features, including 354 additional gullied hillslopes sites that were not identified in V1 of the catalog. These newly indentified gullied hillslopes are not associated with the sites previously identified by Harrison et al. (2015) and their field 'HarrisonID' is therefore = 0. 

Two fields were added to the attribute table: 



Source: if empty, indicates that these gullies were identified through manual, non systematic inspection of imagery. A value of 'Susceptibility_Map' indicates that these gullies were identified during inspection of gully-susceptible terrains (see the 2025 EPSL article). A value of 'UtopiaStudy' indicates that these gullies were found during a systematic and comprehensive inspection of all hillslopes in Utopia Planitia. 

Version: indicates the catalog version to which each gullied hillslope polygon corresponds. Some gullies released in V1 of the catalog were modified (moved and/or reshaped) since V1 and were therefore tagged 'V2' for this field. 


Please note that the Index field 'OBJECTID' is not consistent between V1 and V2 because of the modifications (merging, splitting, removal) of some indexed features since the V1 of the catalog.