Earthquake-DB: historical earthquake database associated with the Dead Sea Transform region

earthquake-db is an open geospatial research database and interactive platform for the study of historical earthquakes associated with the Dead Sea Transform (DST) region and adjacent parts of the Levant and eastern Mediterranean. The project integrates historical earthquake events, damage and environmental effects in a standardized, versioned and openly available framework designed to support reproducible spatial analysis and long-term seismic research.

Project objectives

1. Building a geospatial database integrating historical earthquake events, damage and environmental effects into a unified GIS-based framework.
2. Improving historical earthquake records to enhance the spatial, temporal and descriptive consistency of historical earthquakes across the Levant.
3. Enabling spatial analysis of earthquake records for investigating the spatial distribution of damage and environmental effects, seismic patterns, landscape responses and regional vulnerability.
4. Supporting open and reproducible research through standardized data structures, interactive geospatial visualization and open-access datasets.
5. Bridging past evidence and potential seismic risk integrating historical evidence into research on seismic hazards, disaster resilience and risk assessment.

Dataset and research infrastructure

The database brings together heterogeneous evidence dispersed across historical catalogues, documentary sources, archaeological publications, geological and palaeoseismological studies and environmental-effect inventories. These materials are represented in a standardized relational structure linking earthquake events, sites, reported damage observations and environmental earthquake effects. The data model preserves source-level distinctions while enabling comparison, aggregation, mapping and statistical analysis.

Dataset components

The release contains: (1) an earthquake-event catalogue for the DST region; (2) a geographic gazetteer of historical, archaeological and modern sites; (3) a table of earthquake-damage observations; (4) a table of environmental earthquake effects; (5) documentation describing the database and map-oriented data fields; (6) data-integrity and quality-assurance outputs; and (7) a reproducible statistical-analysis notebook. Existing CSV filenames are retained to support stable downstream use and version comparison.

Evidence and uncertainty

Historical earthquake records are not treated as equivalent to modern instrumental observations. Individual entries may reflect different source traditions, degrees of chronological resolution, location certainty and scholarly reliability. Confidence information is therefore retained as an explicit analytical attribute. The database is a research infrastructure for critical analysis and does not by itself constitute a complete probabilistic seismic-hazard model.

Version 1.3.0. This release introduces a secure web-based administration application that replaces the former Microsoft Access front end used to manage the earthquake database. The new administration environment provides authenticated Administrator and Editor access, dedicated workflows for creating and editing earthquake events and damage and environmental-effect records, server-side validation, concurrency protection and SDE-safe record creation within the existing SQL Server / Enterprise Geodatabase. Spatial entities, including sites and geometry, continue to be managed through the existing ArcGIS spatial-data environment. The scientific database schema remains unchanged. The public interactive mapping application and published CSV datasets retain the functionality of the previous release, while further development of the public interface is deferred to a later version.

Version 1.3.0 data counts

The validated release candidate contains 987 sites, 389 earthquake events, 1,297 earthquake-damage records and 241 environmental-effect records. Final pre-release functional QA found no release-blocking regression. Visual and responsive design refinement is intentionally deferred to later versions.

Open access and associated resources

The complete code and version history are maintained in the GitHub repository. The project website and interactive maps provide browser-based exploration of the database. Associated damage and environmental-effect items can also be explored through the digital collection at the Younes and Soraya Nazarian Library, University of Haifa. The repository is archived by release in Zenodo so that specific versions can be cited and reproduced.

Reproducibility and reuse

Researchers should cite the specific archived version used, retain the original field meanings and provenance and report any filtering, reclassification, geocoding, aggregation or uncertainty-treatment decisions applied in derived analyses. Contributions, corrections and source-based amendments are welcome through the project repository.