ONE Planet DTP - Novel low-lost, wide area monitoring of landslides: precursors and event detection (OP20245)

Landslides triggered by intense or prolonged rainfall are common in the U.K. and can cause significant disruptions to life. The successful management of landslides that threaten people or infrastructure can be broadly grouped into to strategies: 1). Reduce the number of landslides triggered, 2). Reduce the impact of landslide debris. Both strategies can be employed separately or in tandem, using a range of approaches from conventional hard engineering structures through to ‘green schemes’ such as vegetation planting. Regardless of the scheme employed, to demonstrate effectiveness monitoring of the occurrence and impacts of landslides is critical.

Conventional monitoring can be expensive, which limits area coverage and, is often point based measures (piezometers, tilt-meters for example). As a result the early, perhaps precursory movements that precede final failure are often missed and monitoring is a responsive measure employed. In this project we lever low-cost IoT enabled instrumentation that can be deployed to monitor in unprecedented temporal detail, and over site wide scales. This allows for the capture of precursors prior to failure measured in hours to days using combinations of terrestrial laser scanning (TLS), ground-based radar (GB-SAR), seismometers, deformation tracking cameras and automated weather stations for threshold condition analyses.

In this project we want the candidate to:
1. Explore new technologies to measure landslide precursors / final failure (mmRadar and in-situ laser scanners as an example).
2. Develop methods suited to the rapid automated processing of deformation data based on cutting-edge knowledge of the processes that lead to eventual failure.

The candidate will benefit from working closely with our industrial partner Geo-Rope who provide novel mitigation works and monitoring solutions for slope failures.