Disaster prevention for alpine routes

Abstract

Natural disasters are an age-old problem that occur regularly in alpine regions, posing a major threat to the safety of settlements and transport routes. Within the project Safety of Alpine Routes - Application of Earth Observation Combined with GIS (Hannibal) information has been extracted from satellite remote sensing and integrated into a newly developed GIS based Decision Support System (DSS). Some of the required map information were inferred from ERS- and from SPOT5- and QUICKBIRD satellites. Forest and land cover parameters have been derived from the satellite data. Change detection techniques have been applied to monitor e.g. windfall and clear-cut areas. Methods for interferometric processing of radar data have been optimized to detect landslides and to generate maps of motion fields along the slope surfaces. The results show that this information integrated into the DSS is an efficient tool for focusing the attention to potentially endangered areas. © 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.