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

Abstract

The Rock Glacier Inventories and Kinematics (RGIK) community has defined standards for generating Rock Glacier Inventories (RoGIs). 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 5 to 10 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 (gpkg) files for each area: (1) the primary markers (PMs) locating and characterising the identified rock glacier units (RGUs), (2) the moving areas (MAs) delineating areas with surface movement associated with the rock glacier creep based on spaceborne Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR), and (3) the geomorphological outlines (GOs) delineating the restricted and extended rock glacier unit (RGU) boundaries. Here we present the procedure for generating consensus-based RoGIs, 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., 2025; https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14501398). The GeoPackage (gpkg) templates for performing similar RoGIs in other areas and exercises based on the QGIS tool are available on the RGIK website (https://www.rgik.org, last access: 15 August 2025).