U.S. Landslide Inventory and Susceptibility Map

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Landslide inventories are collections of data about where landslides have occurred and may include other important details. This information on where they occur is essential for scientific research on landslides, as well as risk reduction efforts. Different agencies and groups keep their own landslide records, often in various formats and within specific regions, making it hard to get a complete picture. To address this, the USGS has created a nationwide landslide inventory and made it available online through an interactive map. This map includes digital data from both USGS and other sources, all formatted in a consistent way.

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). The database was first created in 2019 and updated in 2022, and it will continue to be updated as new landslide data becomes available. If you have landslide information to contribute, you can contact gs-haz_landslides_inventory@usgs.gov.

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Landslide susceptibility models analyze different terrain features to show where landslides are more or less likely to occur. These maps are useful for land-use planning and reducing risks, and some have been created for areas in the U.S. where landslides are a major concern. However, many other areas lack detailed information about landslide risks and need better tools to assess these hazards.

Previous attempts to map landslide susceptibility across the U.S. and globally lack detail and tend to underestimate hazards in moderately sloping terrain, where most development and infrastructure are located. Using high-resolution USGS elevation data (3DEP) and locations of hundreds of thousands of landslides we test different modeling methods. Ultimately, we developed a more detailed and improved map of landslide susceptibility for the entire U.S. and Puerto Rico. Unfortunately, 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 resolution of the new map (90 m) is less than previous products (1 km).  

The interactive map shows landslide susceptibility with colors ranging from yellow (lower) to red (higher), while areas with no color have negligible risk. Please note, the model does not explicitly account for long-runout and does miss a handful of landslides (<1%) so some caution should be exercised in areas downslope of highly susceptible terrain.  

For more details, you can read the journal article (Mirus et al., 2024) and download the GIS database from the USGS ScienceBase repository (Belair et al., 2024).