The national landslide database of Great Britain: development, evolution and applications

Abstract

Landslide inventories are essential because they provide the basis for predictive landslide hazard and susceptibility assessments and because they allow for the manipulation and storage of temporal and spatial data. The National Landslide Database has been developed by the British Geological Survey (BGS). It is the most extensive source of information on landslides in Great Britain with over 15 000 records of landslide events each documented as fully as possible. This information is invaluable for planners and developers as it helps them investigate, avoid or mitigate areas of unstable ground in accordance with Government planning policy guidelines. Therefore, it is vital that the continual verification, collection and updating of landslide information is carried out as part of the Survey's 'National Capability' work. This paper describes the evolution from a static database to one that is continually updated forming part of a suite of national digital hazard products. The history of the National Landslide Database and associated Geographical Information System (GIS) is discussed, together with its application and future development.

The National Landslide Database of Great Britain: Acquisition, communication and the role of social media

“…The relatively subdued topography and degraded nature of many ancient failures in Great Britain had meant that landsliding was not widely considered to be extensive or problematic. However, costly disruptions to projects in the 1960s by reactivation of previously unrecognised landslides, for example, on the Sevenoaks By-pass (Skempton and Weeks, 1976) and the Walton's Wood motorway embankment (Early and Skempton, 1972) brought about a realisation that the extent of ground instability was not well understood or managed by developers or planners (Foster et al, 2012). This database documented approximately 8,500 records of landslides.…”

“…Since 1995, the DoE database has been incorporated into and combined with other information from a range of data sources discussed in this paper and is now superseded by the BGS National Landslide Database (NLD). The details of the history, work flow, deficiencies and how the current version of the database addresses these are detailed in Foster et al (2012).…”

New Zealand’s National Landslide Database

“…Other attributes, such as nature and length of warning, have not been carried through because these data are rare. The terms and attributes used in the NZLD were also developed by considering those used in other countries such as by the British Geological Survey (Foster et al 2012), the USGS (http:// landslides.usgs.gov/) and Geoscience Australia (Mazengarb et al 2010) in their respective landslide databases.…”

“…Great Britain (Foster et al 2012) and Australia (Mazengarb et al 2010;Chowdhury and Flentje 1998) have recently developed digital landslide databases to aid others in identifying the hazards and risks posed by landslides to society and to provide guidance for landuse planners to recognise areas where landslides are likely to occur and to protect against their consequences (Foster et al 2012). In Hong Kong, a GIS-based landslide database has been developed (Dai and Lee 2002), which links landslide temporal frequency to the physical parameters contributing to initiation, and includes a multiple-regression model for predicting slope…”

Urban Engineering Geological Maps for Bradford, UK

“…However, now, these databases would be hard to access and, indeed, may not be accessible at all (Culshaw and Price 2011). The contents of the landslide database have been incorporated into the National Landslide Database (Foster et al 2012) while the borehole logs were included in the national borehole log database at the British Geological Survey. This paper describes the content of the engineering geological maps produced as part of the study and how they were developed.…”