FIG Commission 6 - Engineering Surveys

Working Group 6.2
Landslides Monitoring

Policy Issues

Landslides, debris flows and rockfalls can endanger inhabitants and infrastructures. If we focus on landslides, they have an important societal impact in many mountainous, hilly and coastal regions in the world. Landslide failures may seriously damage the human and environmental resources of a region. However, it is still uneasy to forecast the evolution of a landslide because it depends both on its dynamics and on external triggering events, such as earthquakes and rainfall. This is why monitoring is essential to learn more on the physical processes controlling their movement (failure, propagation) and to attempt to predict their behaviour in time and space. Innovative investigation, monitoring and mapping techniques are being developed in order to improve the methods for local and regional landslide hazard assessment and/or the design of early warning systems.

WG6.2’s main goals will be to support specialists in landslides monitoring studies with state-ofthe art solutions and provide latest developments and future oriented concepts:

  • Promoting studies on the potential of existing and new sensors to determine geometric deformation quantities from surveying and adjacent fields (remote sensing, seismology, meteorology, hydrology and geochemistry);
  • Promoting the development of concepts for automated data storage, data transfer and data pre-processing;
  • Promoting the adaptation of numerical algorithms to derive relevant deformation quantities in real-time, including concepts from time series analysis;
  • Promoting a multidisciplinary collaboration between surveying, geological, geophysical and geotechnical engineers to understand the behaviour of landslides;
  • Study of most modern concepts for data analysis like artificial neural networks, fuzzy logics and generic algorithms;
  • Investigate and adopt as required modern analysis techniques (Big Data, IoT, etc.) to cope with large volume data arising from large number of low-cost sensors;
  • Study the issues and investigate the challenges arising for using Unmanned Arial Vehicles (UAVs) for deformation monitoring;

Chair

Associate Prof. Dr. Gilbert Ferhat,
France gilbert.ferhat[at]unistra.fr

 

What we are working on -

  • FIG publication on landslides monitoring by surveying methods

What's New