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Rockfall Source Areas Assessment in an Area of the Pollino National Park (Southern Italy)

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Book cover Computational Science and Its Applications – ICCSA 2018 (ICCSA 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 10962))

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Abstract

In the mountainous areas, rockfalls are a common type of massmovements that represents a major cause of fatalities and damages to properties because of their high energy and mobility. For this reason, the assessment of rockfall hazard and risk constitutes an important issue for technicians, administrators and local planners and requires reliable methods, in order to assure a proper land management.

This paper is an attempt to assess rockfall susceptibility; in particular, the attention has been focused on the potential rockfall source areas assessment in the territory of the twenty-four Lucanian municipalities belonging to the Pollino National Park (Southern Italy).

A DEM-based approach has been used, according to the Slope Angle Distribution (SAD) procedure, allowing to identify the most important Morphological Units of the topography: Cliffs, Steep Slopes, Foot Slopes and Plains. A terrain unit (usually a grid cell) is considered as potential rockfall source when its slope angle lie over an angle threshold, which is defined where the Gaussian distribution of the morphological unit “Cliffs” become dominant over the one of “Steep slopes”.

The software Histofit [31] has been a very useful tool for the assessment of rockfall susceptibility.

The results of the application of this approach have been compared with the rockfalls niches observed on the field in order to validate the method. Finally, the influence of the cell size of the DEM has been inspected by applying the methodology over two different DEM resolutions (5 m and 20 m).

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Acknowledgement

The study was carried out in the framework of the project Smart Basilicata in Smart Cities and Communities and Social Innovation (MIUR n.84/Ric 2012, PON 2007 – 2013).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Engineer, University of Basilicata, Viale Dell’Ateneo Lucano 10, 85100, Potenza, Italy

    Rosalba Muzzillo, Lucia Losasso & Francesco Sdao

Authors
  1. Rosalba Muzzillo
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  2. Lucia Losasso
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  3. Francesco Sdao
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Lucia Losasso .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Perugia, Perugia, Italy

    Osvaldo Gervasi

  2. University of Basilicata, Potenza, Italy

    Beniamino Murgante

  3. Covenant University, Ota, Nigeria

    Sanjay Misra

  4. Saint Petersburg State University, Saint Petersburg, Russia

    Elena Stankova

  5. Polytechnic University of Bari, Bari, Italy

    Carmelo M. Torre

  6. University of Minho, Braga, Portugal

    Ana Maria A.C. Rocha

  7. Monash University, Clayton, Victoria, Australia

    David Taniar

  8. Kyushu Sangyo University, Fukuoka shi, Fukuoka, Japan

    Bernady O. Apduhan

  9. Politecnico di Bari, Bari, Italy

    Eufemia Tarantino

  10. Myongji University, Yongin, Korea (Republic of)

    Yeonseung Ryu

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Muzzillo, R., Losasso, L., Sdao, F. (2018). Rockfall Source Areas Assessment in an Area of the Pollino National Park (Southern Italy). In: Gervasi, O., et al. Computational Science and Its Applications – ICCSA 2018. ICCSA 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10962. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95168-3_25

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95168-3_25

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-95168-3

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