Multi-temporal landslide inventories are important information for the understanding of landslide dynamics and related predisposing and triggering factors, and thus a crucial prerequisite for probabilistic hazard and risk assessment. Despite the great importance of these inventories, they do not exist for many landslide prone regions in the world. In this context, the recently evolving global-scale availability of high temporal and spatial resolution optical satellite imagery (RapidEye, Sentinel-2A/B, planet) has opened up new opportunities for the creation of these multi-temporal inventories.
Taking up on these at the time still to be evolving opportunities, a semi-automated spatiotemporal landslide mapper was developed at the Remote Sensing Section of the GFZ Potsdam being capable of deriving post-failure landslide objects (polygons) from optical satellite time series data (Behling et al., 2014). The developed algorithm was applied to a 7500 km² study area using RapidEye time series data which were acquired in the frame of the RESA project (Project ID 424) for the time period between 2009 and 2013. A multi-temporal landslide inventory from 1986 to 2013 derived from multi-sensor optical satellite time series data is available as separate publications (Behling et al., 2016; Behling and Roessner, 2020).
The resulting multi-temporal landslide inventory being subject of this data publication is supplementary to the article of Behling et al. (2014), which describes the developed spatiotemporal landslide mapper in detail. This landslide mapper detects landslide objects by analyzing temporal NDVI-based vegetation cover changes and relief-oriented parameters in a rule-based approach combining pixel- and object-based analysis. Typical landslide-related vegetation changes comprise abrupt disturbances of the vegetation cover in the result of the actual failure as well as post-failure revegetation which usually happens at a slower pace compared to vegetation growth in the surrounding undisturbed areas, since the displaced landslide masses are susceptible to subsequent erosion and reactivation processes. The resulting landslide-specific temporal surface cover dynamics in form of temporal trajectories is used as input information to detect freshly occurred landslides and to separate them from other temporal variations in the surrounding vegetation cover (e.g., seasonal vegetation changes or changes due to agricultural activities) and from permanently non-vegetated areas (e.g., urban non-vegetated areas, water bodies, rock outcrops). For a detailed description of the methodology of the spatiotemporal landslide mapper, please see Behling et al. (2014).
The data are provided in vector format (polygons) in form of a standard shapefile contained in the zip-file Behling_et-al_2014_landslide_inventory_SouthernKyrgyzstan_2009_2013.zip and are described in more detail in the data description file.