Technical Note

Landslides (2016) 13:15451554
DOI 10.1007/s10346-016-0689-3
Received: 27 August 2015
Accepted: 15 February 2016
Published online: 7 May 2016
Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2016
Ubydul Haque I Philipp Blum I Paula F. da Silva I Peter Andersen I Jrgen Pilz I
Sergey R. Chalov I Jean-Philippe Malet I Mateja Jemec Aufli I Norina Andres I
Eleftheria Poyiadji I Pedro C. Lamas I Wenyi Zhang I Igor Peshevski I Halldr G. Ptursson I
Tayfun Kurt I Nikolai Dobrev I Juan Carlos Garca-Davalillo I Matina Halkia I Stefano Ferri I
George Gaprindashvili I Johanna Engstrm I David Keellings

Fatal landslides in Europe

Abstract Landslides are a major hazard causing human and large
economic losses worldwide. However, the quantification of fatali-
ties and casualties is highly underestimated and incomplete, thus,
the estimation of landslide risk is rather ambitious. Hence, a
spatio-temporal distribution of deadly landslides is presented for
27 European countries over the last 20 years (19952014).
Catastrophic landslides are widely distributed throughout
Europe, however, with a great concentration in mountainous
areas. In the studied period, a total of 1370 deaths and 784 injuries
were reported resulting from 476 landslides. Turkey showed the
highest fatalities with 335. An increasing trend of fatal landslides is
observed, with a pronounced number of fatalities in the latest
period from 2008 to 2014. The latter are mostly triggered by
natural extreme events such as storms (i.e., heavy rainfall),
earthquakes, and floods and only minor by human activities,
such as mining and excavation works. Average economic loss
per year in Europe is approximately 4.7 billion Euros. This
study serves as baseline information for further risk mapping
by integrating deadly landslide locations, local land use data,
and will therefore help countries to protect human lives and
property.
Keywords Landslides . Casualties . Fatalities . Europe .
Economic loss
Introduction
The territory of Europe is highly exposed to exogenous slope
processes due to its geological, geomorphological, and climate
variations. Such slope processes include slope mass movements
that can be further categorized into landslides, soil slips, debris
flow, and rock falls. Recently, triggered by increasingly frequent
extreme weather events, mass movements in many European
countries have become common natural phenomena and have
caused considerable damage and economic losses (e.g., Schuster
1996; Klose et al. 2015).
The incidence and recurrence of landslides are conditioned by
several topographic and geo-environmental aspects related to soil
properties, geological structure, lithology and weathering condi-
tions, slope morphology, land cover, and water flow (Margottini
et al. 2013). Landslide natural triggering depends on the rapid
changes in groundwater level and/or flow (volume and velocity),
precipitation (both average and peak), natural erosion (at coastal
cliffs (Landslides 2015), river banks, along slopes, and areas of
sediment discharges (Teramoto et al. 2005), snowmelt, earth-
quakes, and volcanic processes (Margottini et al. 2013; Fell et al.
2008). In addition, landslides can be also triggered by human
activities, namely, by slope undercutting or excavation in the
construction of motor/railways, landfill or building construction,
mining, deforestation, irrigation, during dam construction and
exploitation, and water leakage from utilities (Margottini et al.
2013). Often, it can be a combination of natural and human
activities that induces landslides (European Soil 2015).
According to the World Bank report (2005), 3.7 106 km2 of
land surface is prone to landslides worldwide, and nearly 300
million people live in areas of potential landslide risk (Dilley
et al. 2005). From 2004 to 2010, 2620 deadly landslides were
documented worldwide causing 32,322 fatalities the highest report-
ed value so far (Petley 2012). Landslides also cause billions of
Euros of damage to infrastructure such as roads, railways, pipe-
lines, structures, embankments, buildings, and other property
losses (Sassa and Canuti 2009; Emergency 2015; European Soil
2015; Safe land 2015 ). For example, in Italy, the total annual losses
caused by landslides are 3.9 billion Euros (Klose et al. 2015). In the
present study, an exchange rate from December 2015 with US$
1.0 = 0.91 Euros is applied. In contrast, in Germany, the annual
total loss is only about 0.3 billion Euros, from which about 68
million Euros results must be from damage costs of the highway
system (Klose et al. 2015). In comparison, the global total annual
losses caused by landslides are about 18 billion Euros, which is
about 17 % of the annual average global natural disaster losses with
about 110 billion Euros (Munich 2014). The highest losses per
percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) with 0.19 % world-
wide however occur in Italy, which along with the USA, Japan, and
India suffer the highest economic impact from landslides (Klose
et al. 2015; International Monetary 2015).
In Europe, landslides are widely spatially distributed (Hervs
2003; Van Den Eeckhaut et al. 2012; Gunther et al. 2014) though
they predominate in mountainous, hilly, and coastal regions.
Approximately 1.3 to 3.6 million Europeans live in landslide
prone areas (Jaedicke et al. 2014). Additionally, 8000 to
20,000 km of roads and railways are highly exposed to land-
slides (Jaedicke et al. 2014). Their exposure threatens the effec-
tiveness of emergency response and recovery operations (Safe
land 2015). In the beginning of the twenty-first century, Europes
landslide prone regions have been experiencing an increasing
number of landslide occurrences and casualties (Guha et al.
2015). The International Disaster Database (EM-DAT) reported
that, in the last century, Europe was the second highest in the
world among all continents in fatalities and had the highest
economic losses (1.55 billion Euros) as a result of landslides
(Sassa and Canuti 2009; Guha et al. 2015).
However, there are gaps in the current database and in prior
studies of landslides distribution in Europe (Safe land 2015; Hervs
2003; Gunther et al. 2014). For instance, the actual casualty figures
are greatly underestimated in the EM-DAT database, because most
of the landslides casualties are registered under the main events
that trigger them, such as earthquake, storm and floods (Guha et al.
2015). Previous work on this theme focused on a relatively short

Landslides 13 & (2016) 1545

 Technical Note
time-span (20042010), (Petley 2012). Furthermore, the data
lacked field validation (Petley 2012) and, in recent years, the
economic impact of landslides at country level was not aggregated.
There is an evident need to build a statistical approach to connect
the registered landslides with anthropogenic pressure, as well as
high population growth and density, migration and unplanned
urbanization, environmental degradation, and possibly global cli-
mate change. Until now, in some regions of Europe, very few
attempts were made in relation to the quantitative risk assessment
of landslides, mostly due to limitations of databases.
The objectives of this study are (1) to prepare a database of
deadly landslides for Europe and refine and update the informa-
tion of all existing landslide databases and cross-check fatalities
(herein encompass deaths and missing persons), casualties
(encompassing deaths, injured and missing persons), date, and
locations for each reference and (2) to analyze trends in spatial
and temporal distribution and hotspots (spatio-temporal
clustering) of landslides that caused casualties to ascertain where
deadly landslides are occurring across Europe and to determine if
the incidence of landslide related deaths has increased during the
study period. The contribution of this study is the development of
a European landslide database with an improved quantification of
human and economic (direct and indirect) losses that has hitherto
been compiled for all European countries, from January 1995 to
December 2014.
Methods
Data collection
One of the main objectives of this study is to establish an updated
European landslides database called ELS-DAT. The data encom-
passes events from January 1995 to December 2014, when media
Internet accessibility gained global coverage. Internet search en-
gine Google was used to search deadly landslides in each of the
49 European countries (including Turkey (Country profiles
Europe 2015) and excluding overseas territories) (Fig. 1).
Landslides were reported in 37 European countries for the last
20 years; however, only 27 of them stated casualtiesloss of life,
injury and missing peopleand data were restricted to these 27
countries (Fig. 1). Web sources were used to cross-check and
update the data. There are several potential weaknesses using
Internet and Internet search engines for data collection. The dif-
fusion of Internet and the linking up of media and databases may
differ between countries. Searches in English across the European
lingual cacophony may in cases effect the reliability of the central
search terms (e.g., landslide vs. avalanche and casualty vs. fatality).
There is no certainty that older events are being captured as easily
as more recent. Events in remote areas and smaller events are
likely to be underrepresented (Petley 2012). Hence, each of the
recorded events was validated, cross-checked, and edited if needed
as indicated in Fig. 1. This process helped to validate each event
(e.g., location, corrected date, number of deaths, injury, and miss-
ing) in 25 of the 27 countries (except for Ukraine and Bosnia and
Herzegovina). For some countries such as Armenia, Austria,
Russia, and Spain, the landslide events reported in EM-DAT
(Guha et al. 2015), Landslide blog (The Landslide blog 2015), and
NASA (Landslide catalogue 2015) were not included in this study,
since not all of them could be confirmed by the respective
countrys ministry of internal affairs, geological surveys, and/or
disaster departments. If more than one local community was
affected by a single event, a single dataset was generated by date
and location.
Casualties exclusively due to floods, storms, mining, earth-
quakes, snow avalanches, and volcanic eruptions were excluded,
but data on deadly landslides resulting from those events were
included. A distinct database reporting co-incident (not separable)
events with deadly landslides, such as floods, storms, and earth-
quakes was also created.
Locations for landslides were collected from a combination of
reports from local emergency response and/or fire departments,
newspapers, and scientific articles, or various national agencies
and digital elevation models (2 2 m pixel). If maps were available
in reports or publications the extracted coordinates were cross-
checked with Google Earth to ensure accuracy. In some

> Sources: Google, English daily newspapers in each European country and online reports
> Studied period: 1st January 1995 to 31st December 2014
Search > Search terms: (Albania,...Vacan) AND (landslide) AND (death, killed, injured, missing)
> Inclusion criterion: Reported landslides (disaster)
> Fatal landslides were reported in 27 European countries

> First cross-check and data update from the following web sources:
EM-DAT: http://www.emdat.be/database
Landslide blog: http://blogs.agu.org/landslideblog/
Disaster report: http://www.disaster-report.com/
Relief web: http://reliefweb.int/
IFRC: http://www.ifrc.org/
Update Internaonal consorum on landslides: http://iclhq.org/Europe.htm
Mudslide News: http://www.infopig.com/keywords/Mudslide.html
USGS: http://landslides.usgs.gov/recent/
http://ojostreamer.herokuapp.com/
Killer Disasters: http://www.angelre.com/on/predicons/bymonth.html
Earthquake-Report.com: http://earthquake-report.com/2013/06/01/worldwide-landslide-report/
Google alert: www.google.com/alerts

> Second cross-check with the following country-specic sources:

Ministries such as Ministry of Interior and/or Land
Civil protecon
Database Naonal geological surveys
Meteorological departments and surveys
Police and/or re departments
Sciensts

Fig. 1 Search and development of the European landslides database (ELS-DAT) on fatal landslides for 27 European countries from January 1995 to December 2014

1546 Landslides 13 & (2016)

circumstances, only approximate location was (with an error in
the order of 10 to 5 km) extracted from rough descriptions. All
coordinates, in the Universal Transverse Mercator, WGS 1984
projection, were uploaded in to ArcGIS software (Version 10.1).
Available direct economic costs or losses due to landslides or cost
for repairing houses, roads, embankments, etc. were gathered for
each country. Economic cost data were aggregated at federal state,
insurance company, and at country level. Newspapers and maga-
zines were the main source of loss information for each country.
Based on availability, insured property damage as well as not-
insured or non-insurable material damage was evaluated. These
estimates were largely based on the experience of country-specific
experts. Empirical values were collected from insurance evalua-
tions, damage experts, emergency task forces, and official sites.
Post-reconstruction measures and intangible damage (irreparable
impairment to nature and environment) were not included in
these estimates of monetary values, since some governments do
not make such information available for the public.
Spatial analysis
A hot spot analysis of the daily record of deadly landslides loca-
tions was performed using space-time pattern mining tools in
ArcGIS Pro 1.1. All landslide locations over the 20-year record were
imported into this tool and analyzed for correlations across space
and time to identify locations where landslides have occurred in
close spatial and temporal proximity. Each landslide location was
assigned 85,000 85,000 m spanning area. Each of the time step
intervals is 1 year in duration so the entire time period covered by
the space-time cube was 20 years. Of the total locations, 5.1 %
contain at least one point for at least one time step interval. These
212 locations comprise 4240 space-time bins of which 379 (8.9 %)
have point counts greater than zero. There is a statistically signif-
icant increase in point counts over time. The Emerging Hot Spot
Analysis tool was used for space-time hot spot detection.
Collection of settlement data
The settlement data was used to quantify exposure to deadly
landslides based on 25-km radius (landslide can impact maximum
25 km from its origin) (Legros 2002) of origin of historical (1995
2014) landslide locations. These data were generated from the
European Settlement Map (ESM) 2014, which is a raster data
representing the percentage of built-up area per spatial unit col-
lected from the European Commission (Florczyk et al. 2015). This
Table 1 Casualties and fatalities due to landslides in Europe
Landslide
Deaths (a) 1170
Injured people (b) 758
Casualties (a + b) 1928
Total number of events 457
Average number of fatalities per event >2 3
Average number of casualties per event >4 5
a
Mining, cliff collapse, and train derailment due to landslide, sea erosion, and landslide during construction work
product, released in 100-m spatial resolution, originated from
average aggregation of raster data outputs at 10-m resolution.
The map was produced by automatic information extraction pro-
cesses using SPOT-5 and SPOT-6 satellite images at 2.5-m resolu-
tion. The ESM method used machine learning techniques to
classify systematic relations between morphological and textural
features using panchromatic and multispectral (if available)
bands. This settlement data were not available for Armenia,
Azerbaijan, Georgia, Russian Federation, and Ukraine.
Results
In 27 European countries during the 20-year study period, 1370
deaths and 784 injuries were recorded from 476 deadly landslide
events (Table 1), an average of 108 82 casualties each year. Among
the type of landslides that caused human losses, they found rock
falls, debris flows, and a large number of events, for which the
landslide typology was not identified (herein referred to as landslide
not specified). In the last 20 years, deadly landslides increased in
Europe (Fig. 2) and have been reported throughout the 27 countries
(Fig. 3). In some countries, these landslides have occurred almost
randomly within the 20-year period, but in others, e.g., Italy
and Turkey, many more landslides have been observed in the
second half of the period and particularly in the last 5 years
(Fig. 3). The most seriously affected country (>50 fatalities)
was Turkey (with 335 landslide-induced deaths), followed by
Italy (283), Russia (169), and Portugal (91) (Fig. 4).
Deadly landslides were reported throughout the year, although
casualties dominate with the exception of May (12.6 % of the casu-
alties and 17.5 % fatalities) and July (15 % of the casualties and 18 %
fatalities) (Supplement Figure S1). The highest numbers of deadly
landslides were reported between March and August (Fig. 6 and
Supplement Figure S1), with a continuous increase in the number
of events observed in the summer months followed by decline
through the fall and winter. There are seasonal spatial variations in
landslide occurrence in some countries. For instance, in Italy, land-
slides have occurred predominantly in the North in the summer/fall
and in the winter/spring are dominant in the South (Fig. 6).
Until now, the triggering factors for only 14 % of the studied
landslides could be definitely identified. Fatal landslides were
associated with direct floods (6.5 %), mining (2.6 %), construction
works (1.9 %), storms (0.9 %), coastal erosion (0.7 %), earthquakes
(0.5 %), and train derailment due to landslide (0.8 %) (Supplement
Figure S2). Rainfall was reported before most of the landslides
Associated disasters during landslide Total
Flood Storm Earthquake Othersa
182 3 15 1370
4 3 1 18 784
186 6 1 33 2154
15 3 1 476
>12 13 1
>12 13 2 1
Landslides 13 & (2016) 1547
 Technical Note
350 80

Fatalies
Casuales 70
300
Fatal landslides per year

60
250
Annual casualties and fatalities

Fatal landslides per year

50
200

40

150
30

100
20

50
10

0 0
1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014
Year

Fig. 2 Annual casualties and fatalities and fatal landslides per year for the studied period 19952014

(90 %). Hence, future studies and databases should include the
triggering factors for the recorded landslides.
The most recent (new hot spot) time step interval was hot spot
in the French and Spanish border and Balkan Peninsula (Fig. 7a).
Whereas consecutive hot spots (a single uninterrupted run of hot
time step intervals, comprised of less than 90 % of all intervals)
were detected in most parts of Austria, Bosnia and Herzegovina,
Italy, and Switzerland. Some sporadic (some of the time step
intervals are hot) hot spots were observed in French-Swiss
border, Germany, Romania, and Balkan Peninsula. Significant
upward trend was observed in Austria, Italy, and Turkey
(Fig. 7b).
Settlements within 25 km of an observed landslide were
highlighted (red areas) to illustrate potential impact on human
life (Fig. 8). The map reveals a spatially varied impact of land-
slides on settlements with some landslide locations in close prox-
imity to settlements, representing a greater risk to life, while
others occur in more remote locations. Many of the observed

Fig. 3 Spatial distribution of fatal (death, injury, and missing) landslides

1548 Landslides 13 & (2016)

 400

350

300

250

200
Fatalies

150

100

50

Country

Fig. 4 Country-specific fatalities in Europe

landslides in the Austrian Alps, Northern Italy, Spain, and Turkey Herzegovina, Slovenia, Southern Italy, Portugal, and Western
have occurred in sparsely populated areas. However, it can be Europe have occurred in much more densely populated areas,
seen that the majority of the observed landslides in Bosnia and presenting a greater threat to life Fig. 8.

10000

Italy

1000
Economic loss in Mio. Euro

Germany

Spain
Georgia
100

Bulgaria

Switzerland
Azerbaijan Turkey
Armenia France
10
Macedonia
Slovenia Norway
Serbia Portugal

Iceland
1
1 10 100 1000 10000
Fatalies

Fig. 5 Fatalities and economic losses due to fatal landslides in Europe (Sources: UNDP Armenia 2011; Ministry of Ecology and Natural Resources, Azerbaijan; Geological
Institute, Bulgaria; Grislain-Letrmy and Peinturier 2010; Geological survey of Georgia; Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany; Geological survey of Iceland; MunichRe Insurance
company; Geological survey of FYROM; Finance Norway; Serbian geological society; Statistical office of the Republic Slovenia 2013; Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow
and Landscape Research; Disaster and Emergency Management Presidency of Turkey; Direccin General de Proteccin Civil y Emergencias; Vranken et al. 2014;
Constantinova 2009 and Klose et al. 2015)

Landslides 13 & (2016) 1549

 Technical Note
Fig. 6 Seasonality of fatal landslides in Europe (MAMMarch, April, and May; JJAJune, July, and August; SONSeptember, October, and November;
DJFDecember, January, and February; Red dot shows deadly landslides)
Economic losses as a result of landslides have also been substan-
tial across many of the 27 countries. Landslides in Italy caused
damage of approximately 3.9 billion Euros per year (Fig. 5) (Salvati
et al. 2010). Such annual loss has caused financial damage amounting
to nearly 39.6 million Euros in Switzerland (Hilker et al. 2009) and
5080 million Euros in Belgium (Vranken et al. 2014). In Georgia, it
varies from 6.4 million to 91.2 million Euros per year (Fig. 5)
(Constantinova 2009; Grislain-Letrmy and Peinturier 2010; Roy
and Ochiai 2013). This study suggests total economic loss in Europe
was approximately 4.7 billion Euros in each year (Fig. 5). Economic
loss data were only collected from private insurance companies and
does not include public sector costs.
Discussion
The data indicate an increase in fatal landslides during the
period, which would be consistent with increases in extreme
rainfall events (EEA 2014). However, the comparison of the
periodicity of fatal events may lead to a note of caution
(Fig. 2). It appears that fatal events in for instance Spain,
Switzerland, and Austria have occurred throughout the study
period, while Italy and to some extent Greece are unique by
having nearly all events in the period 20102014 except Sarno
landslides in 1998 causing almost 160 fatalities. In Portugal,
71 % of the death toll is due to two major events involving
debris flows, one in 1997 in S. Miguel Island (Azores), causing
29 fatalities, and the other in 2010 in Madeira Island, causing
42 fatalities; the remaining 29 % are fatalities associated with
earth/rock fall events, causing an average of 2 to 3 deaths. The
1550 Landslides 13 & (2016)
latter might be explained by data capture, which should be better for
the last years due to the increase of events. However, other factors
such as spatial variability in the impacts of climate change are more
likely to be involved and control the increased landslide occurrences.
For example, throughout much of the Iberian Peninsula, there has
been a significant decline in heavy precipitation events, which may
trigger landslides, in the lead up to and during the study period while
other areas such as northern Italy have experienced increases in
heavy precipitation (EEA 2014). Thus, further studies of changes in
extreme precipitation in relation to trends in landslides are
warranted.
Landslides in Europe are reported throughout the year; howev-
er, there is a strong seasonal pattern that is probably dominated by
snow melt (February) and rainfall (April to July), where in July was
the highest peak of fatal landslide numbers (Fig. 6). As the ground
in the North freezes in the winter time, landslides become less
likely. It must be stressed that these conclusions refer to landslide
risk, being larger from May to August, and this could be explained
either by the increase in landslide hazard (i.e., larger number of
landslide occurrence) and/or higher exposure of people to land-
slides (i.e., higher exposure of people to landslides that is due to a
lack of adequate land use planning corresponds to an increased
vulnerability).
Nearly 14 % of fatal landslides were associated with floods,
storms, earthquakes, coastal erosional processes, mining, and
construction works or were subsequently reported after these
events. Flooding is a common phenomenon each year
(Choryski et al. 2012; Kundzewicz et al. 2012) in most parts of
Fig. 7 a Hot spot of landslides in Europe. b Location specific up trend of landslides in Europe
Landslides 13 & (2016) 1551
 Technical Note
Fig. 8 Settlements potentially at risk of fatal landslides. All settlements in blue, buffer polygons, and those settlements within the buffers are colored red, country
boundaries are placed on top
central European countries, and its specific association with
landslides should be mapped as a priority. This study also
showed earthquake, mining, construction works, coastal cliff-
induced landslide and deadly landslides due to train derailment
in Europe (Supplement Figure S2). Nearly 90 % of worldwide
fatalities were caused by landslides triggered by prolonged pre-
cipitation (Sassa and Canuti 2009). The trigger mechanisms for
86 % of deadly landslides that occurred in Europe however
could not be determined, but might be associated with excessive
pore pressure due to rainfall and snow melting or soil erosion
due to deforestation or combination of rainfall and deforesta-
tion (Wienhofer et al. 2011). Further study and detailed location-
specific investigations, risk zone identification, monitoring, and
planning will help in near future and save human lives and
prevent property losses.
Fatalities and casualties have varied through space and time.
Spatial-temporal risk zones are identified (Fig. 3). Reasons of new
and consecutive significant hot spots in central European and
Balkan countries were not immediately clear and need to be
investigated further (Fig. 7a). Increasing trend of landslides in
few spots in Austria, Italy, and Turkey also needs further study
(Fig. 7b). Many of those deadly events recurred in mountain
regions with warm temperate climate, such as in the North-East
of Turkey, Southern Russian Federation, Georgia, Italy, Bosnia,
Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM), Spain,
Austria, and Switzerland. The present study also suggested that
there is a very high mortality (100 dead from 1995 to 2014) as a
direct consequence of landslides in Turkey, Russia, and Italy.
A high resolution (10 m) 2014 settlements map of Europe
showed that most of the places in some Central European and
Mediterranean countries (Switzerland, Austria, Slovenia, Italy,
Spain, Bosnia, FYROM, and Eastern Turkey) have highly exposed
populations (Fig. 8). Such an overview map can serve as a
1552 Landslides 13 & (2016)
preliminary exposure map to identify landslide-exposed popula-
tions to aid in the implementation of protection and emergency
measures.
With such a large increase in the occurrence of landslides, it is
likely that economic losses will continue to grow. This study also
reported yearly loss due to landslides has already surpassed pre-
vious record (Sassa and Canuti 2009; Guha et al. 2015). Economic
loss in this study was given based on the available information.
Detailed information about economic loss will help the govern-
ment, insurance companies, municipal corporations, planners,
policy makers, and disaster authorities to ensure a sustainable
development.
Many of the 27 European countries analyzed are undertaking
different activities to help mitigate landslide risk. Many of them
have landslide inventory maps or are in the phase of preparation
(Van Den Eeckhaut et al. 2012). Also, there exist some studies on
landslide hazard and risk zoning (Van Westen et al. 2006; Gunther
et al. 2013) and some efforts are being made to prepare landslide
susceptibility map for the whole territory of Europe.
The differences in deadly landslide estimates are related both to
methodology and the time period (considered period from
January 1995 to December 2014 in the present study and EM-
DAT covers period from September 2002 to December 2010).
This explains the cases of higher rates of total fatalities in the
present database. In few cases, the lower rates in the present
database in comparison with EM-DAT were identified (Spain and
Austria). It might be due to the separation of other triggering
factors from landslides.
It should also be stressed that although every effort has been
made to compile a complete landslide dataset for these 27
European countries it is possible that landslides have been
underreported in some instances. It is, therefore, likely that the
numbers of casualties and total economic losses from landslides
are underestimated. The roles of increased settlement/population (if
any) and landslide risk mitigation programs played in this period were
unknown.
Conclusion
Landslides are one of the major hazards leading to economic
losses and human fatalities in many countries and European
countries are no exception. However, even in Europe, such infor-
mation is not updated or completed. For this study, information at
national or provincial level from 27 countries such as published
reports, articles, insurance companies, etc. was obtained, using a
combination of Internet sources and validation by each country.
However, it is the authors understanding that some numbers,
namely the economic (direct and indirect) losses are incomplete
and underestimated. From the 20 years of data examined, it is also
clear that landslide casualties and fatalities are dominated by the
effects of large events. The data may indicate a trend of increasing
numbers of human casualties caused by landslides, but the meth-
od applied does not ensure equal data registration throughout the
period. Some seasonal spatial variation was registered at certain
regions. Landslides occur mostly in Central and Northern Europe
during the summer and fall, in Southern Europe mainly in the
winter and spring period. This study provides baseline informa-
tion for further studies. Thus, more comprehensive studies of
causes of the increasing number of fatal landslides are necessary.
Acknowledgments
This work was funded in part by the Emerging Pathogens Institute
at the University of Florida and the College of Liberal Arts and
Sciences, as part of the University of Florida Pre-eminence
Initiative.
Paula Silva and Pedro Lamas work was supported by UID/GEO/
04035/2013. Spanish landslides data have been obtained from the
MOVES database which it is currently being developed in the
Base de datos de Movimietos del Terreno en Espaa project
funded by the Geological Survey and Mining of Spain (IGME).
The authors also thank Nagy Imre, Department of Geography,
Tourism and Hotel Management, Faculty of Sciences, University
of Novi Sad, Serbia; Arshavir Avagyan and Alexander Arakelyan,
Institute of Geological Sciences, Armenia; Graziella Devoli, Nor-
wegian Water Resources and Energy directorate, Oslo, Norway;
Jelena Golijanin, Department of Geography, University of East
Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina for verifying Serbian, Arme-
nian, Norwegian and Bosnia and Herzegovinas data. The authors
also thank Professor Gregory E. Glass for his valuable comments.
Last but not least, we would like to thank the editors and two
anonymous reviewers for their fruitful comments.
Author contributions Ubydul Haque conceived the study design,
prepared the database, analyzed the data, and drafted the manu-
script. David Keellings and Philipp Blum contributed to the meth-
odology and drafted the methods, results, and figures as well as
edited the manuscript. Paula F. da Silva, Graziella Devoli, Peter
Andersen, Jrgen Pilz, Sergey R. Chalov, Jean-Philippe Malet,
Mateja Jemec Aufli, Norina Andres, Eleftheria Poyiadji, Jelena
Golijanin, Pedro C. Lamas, Wenyi Zhang, Igor Peshevski, Halldr
G. Ptursson, Tayfun Kurt, Nikolai Dobrev, Juan Carlos Garca-
Davalillo, and George Gaprindashvili contributed with data collec-
tion, study design, interpretation of findings and edited the
manuscript. Johanna Engstrm contributed to figure production
and data visualization. Matina Halkia, Stefano Ferri and Martino
Pesaresi shared European settlement data. All authors read and
approved final version of the manuscript.
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s10346-016-0689-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized I. Peshevski
users. H. G. Ptursson
Department of Geotechnics, Faculty of Civil Engineering,
U. Haque : J. Engstrm : D. Keellings
Icelandic
UniversityInstitute
Ss. Cyrilofand
Natural History,
Methodius,
Akureyri, Iceland
Skopje, Macedonia
Department of Geography,
University of Florida, T.
Gainesville, FL, USA H. Kurt
G. Ptursson
Istanbul
Icelandic University,
Institute ofFaculty
NaturalofHistory,
Forestry, Department of Forest Construction and

U. Haque ()) : D. Keellings

Transportation,
Akureyri, IcelandBaheky/Saryer
Istanbul, Turkey
Emerging Pathogens Institute,
University of Florida, T. Kurt
N. Dobrev of Forest Construction and Transportation,
Department
Gainesville, FL, USA Geological Institute, Faculty
BAS, of Forestry,
e-mail: ubydul.kth@gmail.com Istanbul University,
Sofia, Bulgaria
Baheky-Saryer/Istanbul, Turkey
P. Blum ()) J.
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), N. C.Dobrev
Garca-Davalillo
Geological
Geological and Mining
Institute, Institute of Spain (IGME),
BAS,
Institute for Applied Geosciences (AGW), Geological Risk Area,
Kaiserstr. 12, 76131 Karlsruhe, Germany Sofia, Bulgaria
Valencia, Spain
e-mail: philipp.blum@kit.edu
J. C. Garca-Davalillo
P. F. da Silva : P. C. Lamas
M. S. Ferri
Halkia and
Geological Mining Institute of Spain (IGME),
European
Geological Risk Area, Joint Research Centre
Commission,
GeoBioTec & Dept. Cincias da Terra, Fac. Cincias e Tecnologia, Ispra, Italy
Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Valencia, Spain

Halkia : S. Ferri
Caparica, Portugal G.
M. Gaprindashvili
Department
Joint of Centre,
Research Geology,European
NationalCommission,
Environmental Agency, Ministry of Environment and
P. Andersen NaturalItaly
Resources Protection,
Department of Geography, Ispra,
Tbilisi, Georgia
University of Bergen,
Bergen, Norway G. Gaprindashvili
Department of Geology, National Environmental Agency, Ministry of Environment and
Natural Resources Protection,
J. Pilz Tbilisi, Georgia
Alpen-Adria University of Klagenfurt,
Universittsstr. 65-67, 9020,
Klagenfurt, Austria

1554 Landslides 13 & (2016)