RER2023: the landslide inventory dataset of the May 2023 Emilia-Romagna meteorological event

Abstract. Landslide inventories play a vital role in assessing susceptibility, hazards, and risks and are essential for developing resilience strategies in mountainous areas. This importance is amplified in the context of climate change as existing inventories might not adequately reflect changing stability conditions. In May 2023, the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy was hit by two major rainfall events, leading to widespread flooding and the triggering of thousands of landslides. Predominantly, these were shallow debris slides and debris flows, occurring on slopes previously deemed to be stable based on historical data, with no prior landslides recorded. Our team supported the Civil Protection Agency through field surveys and mapping efforts to pinpoint and record these landslides, prioritizing areas critical to immediate public safety and focusing on thorough mapping for future recovery planning. The outcome is a detailed map of all landslides induced by these events, manually identified using high-resolution aerial photography (0.2 m pixel resolution; four bands – RGB and near-infrared (NIR)) and categorized with the help of a 3D viewer. This comprehensive landslide inventory, comprising 80997 landslide polygons, has been made openly accessible to the scientific community (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13742643, Pizziolo et al., 2024).