Rock Glacier Inventories (RoGIs) in 12 areas worldwide using a multi-operator consensus-based procedure

2025

Full text Open access: Gold Metadata (CSL-JSON)
DOI 10.5194/essd-17-4125-2025
Data confidence 70 medium
How this score is calculated

It is built from checkable properties of the record itself: whether the article has a DOI, how many independent sources confirmed its data, whether the required fields are filled in, and how recent the latest confirmation is. Disagreement between sources and a missing identifier lower it. A value of 80 or above means the record was published without further checking; 60 to 79 means it is published at reduced confidence, with a manual check advisable. A record verified by an editor by hand is never pushed below 90 by a recalculation. This scores our data about the article, not the article itself.

Abstract

Abstract. The Rock Glacier Inventories and Kinematics community (RGIK) has defined standards for generating Rock Glacier Inventories (RoGI). In the framework of the European Space Agency Climate Change Initiative for Permafrost (ESA CCI Permafrost), we set up a multi-operator mapping exercise in 12 areas around the world. Each RoGI team was composed of five to ten operators, involving 41 persons in total. Each operator performed similar steps following the RGIK guidelines (RGIK, 2023a) and using a similar QGIS tool. The individual results were compared and combined after common meetings to agree on the final consensus-based solutions. In total, 337 “certain” rock glaciers have been identified and characterised, and 222 additional landforms have been identified as “uncertain” rock glaciers. The dataset consists of three GeoPackage files for each area: 1) the Primary Markers (PM) locating and characterising the identified Rock Glacier Units (RGU), 2) the Moving Areas (MA) delineating areas with surface movement associated with the rock glacier creep, based on spaceborne Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR), and 3) the Geomorphological Outlines (GO) delineating the restricted and extended RGU boundaries. Here we present the procedure for generating consensus-based RoGI, describe the data properties, highlight their value and limitations, and discuss potential applications. The final PM/MA/GO dataset is available on Zenodo (Rouyet et al., 2024; https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14501399). The GeoPackage (gpkg) templates for performing similar RoGI in other areas, and exercises based on the QGIS tool, are available on the RGIK website (https://www.rgik.org).