Landslides monitoring
The monitoring of parameters that contributes to the predisposition, triggering and evolution of natural processes such as the slope instability plays a key role in the acquisition of the principal elements for the control and risk reduction.
The monitoring of areas affected by landslides allows, on one hand, to increase knowledge for defining the geological and geotechnical models of evolution of the phenomena and, on the other, to develop systems for the risk mitigation based on identification of alarm thresholds.
This activity represents a valid support for the environmental protection. It offers a valid contribution to the development of strategies at local and regional scale, for the hazard management in intensely inhabited areas, where are major infrastructures or for their vulnerability.
The geodetic monitoring networks based on terrestrial and satellite survey techniques allow to appreciate sub-centimeter displacements on the horizontal and vertical components (sub-millimeter accuracy in the case of the Precise Leveling), provided that the acquisition and elaboration phases must be extremely accurate. These are strictly depend on instrumentation used, topology of the networks, duration of the observing sessions and data processing software. The Geophysical Unit of ISPRA has started since a few years some activities based on applications of geodetic methods through GPS techniques (Global Positioning System) either in survey-style or continuous mode and robotic total station to the detection of:
- surficial movements in urban areas for anthropic factors (V.le Newton landslide, Roma);
- compound landslides (Costa della Gaveta landslide-PZ, Acri landslide-CS);
- earthquake-induced landslide (Salcito landslide);
- deep gravitational slope deformations as sackung type (Lago landslide-CS, Savuto landslide-CS, Platì landslide-RC).
Earthquake-induced Salcito landslide
Lago Landslide-CS (Greci-Piscopie villages)
Costa della Gaveta landslide - Potenza
Acri landslide - Serra di Buda - Cosenza (Calabria-Italy)
Last update: April 2022