Towards a common approach to identify landslide risk areas in Europe in the context of EU policies: First developments

In the context of the EU Soil Thematic Strategy and the associated proposal for a Soil Framework Directive, and the INSPIRE Directive specifications on Natural Risk Zones, a number of recommendations and developments have been made for common approaches and practices to identify and map landslide risk areas in Europe. First, recommendations have been issued for mapping landslide susceptibility areas based on geographicallynested, Tier approaches by collaborative work of the European Landslide Expert Group hosted by JRC (http://eusoils.jrc.ec.europa.eu/library/themes/Landsli des/wg.html; Hervas et al., 2007). Further to these recommendations, a first version of the 1 km resolution (1:1M scale) European Landslide Susceptibility Map (ELSUS 1000 version 1) has been recently published (Fig. 1; Gunther et al., 2013). The map was produced by spatial multicriteria evaluation modelling using panEuropean slope angle, lithology and land use datasets and the location of over 102,000 landslides throughout Europe. The map can be downloaded from the European Soil Data Centre (ESDAC; http://eusoils. jrc.ec.europa.eu/library/themes/Landslides/#ELSUS).