Osterroth, Sebastian; Malka, Anna; Arnold, Alexandra; Grimm, Bastian; Hettwer, Felix; Moslemipour, Abolfazl; Wehinger, Ansgar; Michael, Kersten; Enzmann, Frieder: Long‑term georeferenced dataset of historical landslide events (70 AD–2011) in the Mainz Basin, eastern Rhineland‑Palatinate, Germany [dataset]. PANGAEA, https://doi.pangaea.de/10.1594/PANGAEA.996175 (dataset in review)

This dataset compiles a harmonised inventory of historical landslide events and their reported impacts in the Mainz Basin from 70 AD to 2011, derived from an extensive survey of archival and documentary sources. Documentary material was gathered from regional and national libraries, historical societies, institutional repositories, hard to access collections, additionally complemented by structured interviews with long term residents, local authorities, farmers including vineyard owners. Textual, cartographic and documentary sources were systematically catalogued, critically evaluated for reliability as well as dating accuracy. All events were georeferenced wherever possible, then integrated into a common GIS framework. The resulting database consists of an event table, in which each row represents an interpreted landslide event and its associated attributes, and a corresponding spatial dataset of point features. To handle large text corpora from heterogeneous archival materials, AI assisted tools (Gemini Notebook, customised Gemini based workflows) were employed to support document standardisation, information extraction along with the application of predefined classification criteria, with all automatically generated outputs being checked and refined by the authors. The dataset provides a reproducible, source based reconstruction of the chronology, distribution and impacts of historical landslides in the Mainz Basin. The data is intended as a basis for subsequent geomorphological, temporal and statistical analyses, as well as for integration with additional thematic layers such as lithology, topography, land cover and climate.

File descriptions:

The 'Historical_landslide_events' worksheet contains a georeferenced event table of historical landslides in the Mainz Basin (70 AD–2011). Each row represents a single interpreted landslide event and includes attributes such as event ID, date or time interval, locality, coordinates (ETRS89 / UTM zone 32N and WGS84), landslide activity, creeping, impacts, causes, countermeasures, notes (in English / German), location accuracy and references. This file forms the core event database used for subsequent geomorphological, historical and statistical analyses.

The 'Information' worksheet provides a detailed description of the dataset and its structure.

The 'Documentation' worksheet contains code lists and definitions for categorical variables used in the event table, including Landslide_activity, Creeping and Location_accuracy. For each variable, the file provides the code used in the dataset, a short label and a textual definition, as well as references to the underlying classification schemes, where applicable. Together, these worksheets document the classification system and support reproducibility along with interoperability of the landslide dataset.