A national-scale methodology for prioritizing landslide monitoring sites

Landslides represent a crucial issue for Italy due to their impacts on population, environment, cultural heritage, transportation infrastructure, and economic activities. More than 684,000 landslides have been mapped in the Italian Landslide Inventory, and approximately 28% of them are classified as rapid phenomena, such as rock falls and debris flows, often associated with serious consequences in terms of loss of human lives and damage to buildings and infrastructure.

As highlighted in the Kyoto 2020 Commitment for the Global Promotion of Understanding and Reducing Landslide Disaster Risk, effective landslide risk reduction relies on improved understanding of landslide processes, increased public awareness, and the continuous advancement of monitoring technologies. In this framework, landslide in situ monitoring represents a strategic action to assess landslide evolution, support the design of stabilization works, and verify their effectiveness over time, as well as to alert the population through early warning systems (EWS).

A methodology for the prioritization of landslide monitoring sites has been developed and tested at the national scale, in the framework of the RESILIENT research Project “Risk Evaluation and Smart Implementation of Landslide monItoring by citizen Engagement and New Technologies” funded by Fondazione Cariplo's “Safe Territories” initiative. The adopted methodology is the result of a multidisciplinary effort involving geologists, engineers, risk analysts, public authorities, and other stakeholders, ensuring that both scientific robustness and operational needs were addressed.

This prioritization approach takes into account several factors describing landslide hazard (e.g., type of movement, area, velocity) as well as potential impact on human lives and infrastructure (buildings, urban areas, population, road and railway network, service infrastructure, cultural heritage, etc.). Such algorithm may become a valuable tool to support decision-makers in selecting new sites where a landslide monitoring system could provide the greatest benefits for local communities in terms of risk reduction.

To date (January 2026), information on 1,024 in situ monitoring systems across the country is available in the National Register of Landslide in situ Monitoring Systems, designed by ISPRA in 2021, in collaboration with Regions, Provinces, and Regional Environmental Protection Agencies (ARPAs). Active monitoring systems are 545 (53%) while dismantled and under construction systems are 358 (35%) and 121 (12%), respectively. Most of the systems (827; 81%) have a knowledge purpose while 197 systems (19%) are or have been also used as early warning systems. Data acquisition is performed manually (67.4%), automatically (13%) or in both ways (19.6%). The most used instruments are inclinometers and piezometers, followed by topographic instrumentation (e.g., Total Stations, GNSS), crack meters, weather stations, strain gauges, etc. Data is published in the Landslide monitoring section of the IdroGEO national web platform (https://idrogeo.isprambiente.it), accessible from desktops, tablets, and smartphones, that allows viewing monitoring system/stations/sensors location and metadata information, searching and filtering of monitoring systems, and statistics on number, data acquisition and type of instrumentation.