Development of Multi-Temporal Landslide Inventory Information System for Southern Kyrgyzstan Using GIS and Satellite Remote Sensing

Abstract

Summary: In Southern Kyrgyzstan, landslides regularly endanger human lives and infrastructure. They are a very dynamic phenomenon with significant variations of the process activity in different years. This creates a need for the development of new methods of dynamic and spatially differentiated landslide hazard assessment at a regional scale. Because of the large size of the study area (over 12,000 km²), remote sensing data are a valuable and reliable source of detailed and consistent spatial information for landslide investigations in Southern Kyrgyzstan. The paper demonstrates how GIS and remote sensing techniques are used for the acquisition, verification and homogenization of heterogeneous multi-source landslide data with the goal of generating a multi-temporal landslide inventory. Special emphasis is placed on the spatial data consistency, the documentation of temporal information and the possibility to document repeated slope failures within the same slope. The multi-temporal landslide inventory is an integral part of a landslide inventory information system, which is implemented in the QGIS environment and provides self-customized functionality for data queries and spatial analysis including the derivation of landslide attributes. The information system contains additional spatial base data such as a spatially consistent multi-temporal archive of satellite images and topographic maps.