SENSUM: Smart SENSing of landscapes Undergoing hazardous hydrogeological Movement

Lead Research Organisation: UNIVERSITY OF EXETER
Department Name: Geography

Abstract

Floods and landslides affect the UK every year, both inland and along the coast, causing disruption, occasional fatalities and severe economic loss. An increase in storminess under climate change and population pressure are resulting in an increase in landslide and flood hazards in the UK and globally and threatening the defences put in place to manage these hazards. Monitoring of unstable hillslopes and flood-prone rivers as well as defences designed to manage these is increasingly vital. Landslides and floods are both triggered by heavy rainfall, often occur at the same time, and may interact to generate a chain reaction of knock-on hazardous effects. SENSUM proposes a new integrated way to tackle these 'hydrogeological' hazards, taking advantage of advances in Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, microelectronics and machine learning. Those exciting new tools will be used to monitor the stability of defences, provide warnings of hazard events, and improve mathematical models and visualisation of hazardous phenomena.

Landslides and floods have traditionally been monitored using a combination of satellite-based remote-sensing techniques and wired ground-based instruments to measure factors that control the related hazard, such as river flow level, displacement and soil moisture. Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) show great potential for monitoring and early warning of these hazards. Their main advantage is their use of easily deployable, low-power sensors enabling continuous, long-term, low-cost monitoring of the environment. For landslides and floods, which occur infrequently and unpredictably, this is an important technological advance. SENSUM proposes to develop innovative smart tracking devices, embedded in boulders and woody debris on hillslopes and in rivers to give real-time warning of movement related to landslide and flood processes. Collaborating closely with external partners, the team of experts in the SENSUM project will develop and test the tracking devices both in dedicated laboratory experiments and in the field, with the deployment of trial networks of smart boulders and woody debris in different localities in the UK and abroad. The large set of data obtained from sites and experiments will be used to improve mathematical models, to develop innovative early warning systems and in 3D digital visualisations. This integrated approach will enable us to establish a comprehensive understanding of landslide and flood processes which will significantly reduce risk to society.

The SENSUM team is a diverse, interdisciplinary and multinational team made up of a range of environmental scientists and engineers, computer scientists and science communication specialists from three leading UK universities: University of Exeter, University of East Anglia and University of Plymouth and will involve several project partners including the Environment Agency, Forest England, Natural England and AECOM. It will work closely with these project partners to design an effective digital environment for monitoring and managing landslide and flood hazards in the UK, and to target applied risk management challenges. For example, in the UK, the Environment Agency is tasked with giving a 2-hour warning to the population affected by floods. However, these warnings are lacking in the upland areas of the UK's landscape due to a lack of instruments to monitor river flow. The smart tracking devices embedded within boulder and woody debris in landslides and river channels proposed by SENSUM will help address that limitation, and therefore will significantly improve early warning of movement and consequently the assessment of potential high-risk natural events. The team will also engage stakeholders and the general public through the creation of compelling visualizations of landslide and flood hazards and through project workshops and outreach activities.

Planned Impact

SENSUM will develop and demonstrate several new technologies for landslide and hazard assessment and management in the UK and globally. It will also collect novel and valuable datasets on dynamics of landslides and floods that will enhance understanding and models of landslides and floods. Through close collaboration with stakeholders at workshops and field visits, SENSUM will ensure the positive economic and societal impacts and legacy of new technologies and process understanding during and beyond the duration of the project.

The smart tracking devices that SENSUM will develop will be a low cost device (at £200 for first prototypes) that will be useful for both academics and industry for tracking movement and monitoring hazards with WSNs and IoT technology. SENSUM will build on a proof of concept study by members of the team to demonstrate the full potential of this sensor technology for detecting and tracking landslide and flood hazards. The technology will provide a low cost solution to enhance the monitoring of these hazards by businesses such as AECOM with wider economic and societal benefits. The tracking devices will also enable the SENSUM team to collect unprecedented datasets and understanding of landslide and flood processes. These results will also be shared with stakeholders to further enhance management practice.

The smart tracking devices will also be useful for monitoring stability and movement of wood in rivers, informing Natural Flood Risk Management (NFM) practice in the UK. In particular tagging of large wood and boulders used to create 'leaky dams' will fill a big gap in understanding of the engineering performance of these structures. Discussions on this work have already begun between the SENSUM team and the Environment Agency (EA). Outcomes from this research could inform the development of industry guidance inputting directly to the development of the CIRIA-led NFM Design Guide that the EA is involved in and will help target maintenance of these structures by the EA and land managers. More accurate characterisation of the rheology and of the dynamics of the flows produced by SENSUM will be used as input parameters in numerical models to improve their predictive capability of landslides and debris transport in floods. This will help with decision making, for example regarding installation of mitigation measures and leaky dams to minimize risk to critical infrastructure and affected area.

SENSUM will be a pioneer in demonstrating the potential of machine learning in combination with WSN technology for the early warning of hydrogeological hazards. It will develop a practically applicable system to provide early warning of floods and landslides and help to mitigate their impacts on communities and infrastructure. The early warning system underpinned by IoT networking technologies will be co-designed and shared with stakeholders and PPs at SENSUM project workshops. We will also design a web interface for visualizing data from wireless sensor networks for the benefit of academics studying landslide-flood dynamics and to help stakeholders to visualize and monitor movement e.g. around critical infrastructure. The SENSUM team will work to integrate sensor technology, the web interface and early warning system to provide a complete monitoring system to revolutionize landslide and flood management.

Multiple stakeholders will benefit from the 3D visualizations of hazardous landslide and flood events that will be produced by SENSUM based on novel datasets, improved model simulations and images collected through citizen science. These will be projected in the unique Immersive Vision Theatre (IVT) and widely shared with an inflatable IVT via outreach events in the UK. This dynamic digital hazard visualization will be a powerful tool for facilitating exchanges between scientists and at-risk populations and ultimately helping to increase preparedness and resilience to landslide and flood risks.
 
Title Short film/visualisation giving overview of the project 
Description Produced by members of SENSUM team at University of Plymouth, notably Andrew Prior and Irene Manzella. Can be shown in IVT theatres and was used in the SENSUM final workshop which included stakeholders. It will be made available on YouTube and will also be used in outreach events such as Science Festivals in the future. 
Type Of Art Artefact (including digital) 
Year Produced 2023 
Impact Shown in SENSUM final workshop to the team and to project partners and stakeholders to enhance understanding of hazardous movement on landslides and in rivers, and technology used to study these. 
URL https://liveplymouthac-my.sharepoint.com/personal/andrew_prior_plymouth_ac_uk/_layouts/15/stream.asp...
 
Description We have developed Wireless Sensor Technology for monitoring stability of hillslopes and of large wood dams used in natural flood management in many upland rivers. Sensors consist of Inertial Measurement Unit sensors which include accelerometers, gyroscopes and magnetometers and are embedded in boulder and wood debris on hillslopes and in upland rivers and can detect movement, e.g. tilting of an object and subsequent movement. IMUs are used in multiple applications but never before in monitoring stability of hillslopes. Furthermore whilst large wood dams are now widely used, their stability is not routinely assessed. Our sensors are unique due to a clever power usage in which they sleep unless movement is detected, enabling them to monitor natural events such as landslides and floods over the course of at least a year before batteries need changing. We have established several Wireless Sensor Networks in sites around the UK including The Spittles at Lyme Regis, Compton Cliffs, Isle of Wight and Yarner Woods on Dartmoor to monitor hazardous movement in the landscape. We have built a server and data portal that ingests and visualizes data at a frequency of up to 20 times per second (20 Hz). Data is sent via Long Range Wireless Area Network (LoRaWAN) gateways set up near the sites (e.g. on the top of Charmouth public toilets for our site at The Spittles) and then via the mobile phone network to our servers. This gives us ability to monitor landslide movement in near-real time. We have started to analyse data collected over the past ~2 years and will publish this soon. We will also make the data portal available to stakeholders that will display real time data and eventually alerts of hazardous movement, as we continue to work on many of the sites with our new PhD student. Laboratory experiments at the University of Plymouth on SENSUM showed that it is possible to distinguish between different styles of landslide movement (rolling or sliding) from sensor data, work that is currently in review for publication. They also showed how large wood dams may show vibrations even due to movement of water around them and not necessarily due to movement of wood, which will be important when trying to analyse data from large wood field sites. Finally we produced films of the project that help to communicate landslide and flood hazards to stakeholders. These will soon be available on YouTube and can be shown in Immersive Visualisation Theatres at future Science Outreach events.
Exploitation Route We are already involved in two further research projects that want to use our sensors to track fluvial bedload waves in the Himalaya. We have a proposal in review for EPSRC (LEAP) in which we would install our sensors in spoil heaps in Wales as we were contacted by Camborne School of Mines during the project. We are developing another sensor with another software engineer, Copernicus Technologies, because the sensor used in SENSUM was discontinued by the software engineer we had been working with, MiroMico. This development will take some time but then this sensor can be used in many other applications needing to assess movement of objects remotely and in near real time.
Sectors Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software)

Environment

URL https://sensum.ac.uk
 
Description We found a lack of movement of large wood at Yarner Woods, Dartmoor, a result that enabled Natural England to obtain more funding from the Environment Agency to install more wood debris dams in the system to help reduce flood risk to Bovey Tracey and downstream.
First Year Of Impact 2023
Sector Environment
Impact Types Societal

 
Description Deconstructing Landscape Legacies Of Cataclysmic Mass Flows
Amount £997,000 (GBP)
Organisation Natural Environment Research Council 
Sector Public
Country United Kingdom
Start 03/2024 
End 04/2027
 
Description Tracking sediment waves through Himalayan fluvial cascades following extreme mass flows
Amount £103,250 (GBP)
Funding ID NE/Y002911/1 
Organisation Natural Environment Research Council 
Sector Public
Country United Kingdom
Start 12/2023 
End 12/2025
 
Title Simulated motion of cylindrical woody debris travelling along a straight flume using the DualSPHysics modelling framework 
Description This dataset contains outputs from the numerical simulations of a single cylindrical woody debris being released in a flume (0.6 m wide and 6.0 m long) with a flow depth of 0.208 m and travelling downstream. The outputs include: position, orientation, linear velocity and acceleration, and angular velocity and acceleration. The simulations were carried out by using DualSPHysics, an open source SPH-based modelling framework. Four flow conditions and three different initial orientations (0, -5 and +5 deg) were simulated. 
Type Of Material Database/Collection of data 
Year Produced 2024 
Provided To Others? Yes  
URL https://catalogue.ceh.ac.uk/id/2221837a-98b9-4802-9e10-72b6e9c84136
 
Title Smart sensor data from tracking cobble movement in rolling and sliding experiments 
Description These data show the results of experiments consisting of releasing a cobble down a tilting table composed of two panels. The first board was 150 cm wide and 150 cm long and can change the inclination, whereas the other one was 150 cm wide, and 200 cm long and always stayed horizontal. Experiments were carried out for different slope angles and camera- and sensor-based data collected to show cobble motion over time. The cobble motion is described by the smart sensor data (accelerometer, gyroscope, and magnetometer) and the position computed from camera recordings by a detection algorithm 
Type Of Material Database/Collection of data 
Year Produced 2023 
Provided To Others? Yes  
URL https://catalogue.ceh.ac.uk/id/14c540a8-1894-43c5-ba3b-1045df73e28f
 
Description Partnership with Cambourne School of MInes 
Organisation Camborne School of Mines
Country United Kingdom 
Sector Academic/University 
PI Contribution We visited the site with members of the Camborne School of mines on a scoping visit
Collaborator Contribution They did background research on the sites that would be most impactful to investigate involving meeting with the Welsh Government
Impact We have scoped out several spoil heaps in Wales that we intend to tag with sensors to monitor instability as a collaboration with the TEXMIN EU project and Welsh Government.
Start Year 2021
 
Description Partnership with Pennal catchment partnership 
Organisation Forest Research
Country United Kingdom 
Sector Public 
PI Contribution We have established a collaboration with the Pennal catchment partnership https://businesswales.gov.wales/walesruralnetwork/local-action-groups-and-projects/projects/pennal-2050 in North Wales and met with members of the partnership including Heather Mitchell in November 2022. We will monitor the stability of woody debris dams in the Pennal catchment with SENSUM sensors.
Collaborator Contribution They are providing access to the site and data on river discharge, rainfall and catchment characterisitics and allowing us to use their communication gateway to collect data in real time from our sensors.
Impact Installation of woody debris dams has commenced and will be completed in 2022. Multidisciplinary - forestry, farmers, scientists
Start Year 2021
 
Description Partnership with University of Grenoble 
Organisation University of Grenoble
Country France 
Sector Academic/University 
PI Contribution We supplied the sensors, the method for installation of these in slidecubes (predesigned boulders), and provided support with installation
Collaborator Contribution They installed the sensors in collaboration with other researchers in Grenoble in order to compare the performance of our sensors with existing sensors on the landslide for monitoring displacement
Impact Installation of a landslide in France with SENSUM sensors by former BOULDER postdoc, now a research fellow at University of Grenoble
Start Year 2021
 
Description 40th IAHR World Congress "Rivers - connecting mountains and coasts" (21-25 August 2023) in Vienna. (presentation title "Using Smart Sensors to Track Woody Debris in Flume Experiments") 
Form Of Engagement Activity A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Other audiences
Results and Impact 40th IAHR World Congress "Rivers - connecting mountains and coasts" (21-25 August 2023) in Vienna. (presentation title "Using Smart Sensors to Track Woody Debris in Flume Experiments")
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2023
 
Description Digital Unlocking Environmental Challenges meeting" (5 September 2023) at Royal Society, London 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach National
Primary Audience Other audiences
Results and Impact Digital Unlocking Environmental Challenges meeting" (5 September 2023) at Royal Society, London
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2023
 
Description EGU presentations 
Form Of Engagement Activity A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Other audiences
Results and Impact Four SENSUM members gave presentations at the EGU meeting in May 2022 on different aspects of SENSUM within a new session on technlogies for monitoring sediment transport
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2022
 
Description Final SENSUM workshop 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach National
Primary Audience Policymakers/politicians
Results and Impact Final SENSUM workshop presenting results of the project and next steps. Attended by SENSUM team and several project partners. Visualisations from the project were also shown for the first time.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2023
 
Description Presentations at EGU conference in Vienna 
Form Of Engagement Activity A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Other audiences
Results and Impact PI gave PICO talk on a session on new methods for tracking sediment, sparking discussion
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2023
 
Description Presentations at World Landslide Forum, Florence, Italy, November 2024 
Form Of Engagement Activity A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Other audiences
Results and Impact PI and CoI gave presentations at this landslide conference sparking discussion about the technology we are developing on the project
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2023
URL https://wlf6.org/
 
Description Science and Technology Showcase 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach Regional
Primary Audience Schools
Results and Impact The Science and Technology Showcase (SciTech Showcase) is held on every year on campus to raise school and college students' aspirations in science and technology subjects. Different departments across the Faculty of Science and Engineering organise interactive hands-on exhibits to showcase research and its impact on society. In the 2022 SciTech Showcase, Sarah, Martina, and Alessandro organised a stand for SciTech to advertise SENSUM project and talk about the benefits of IoT sensing technology in geomorphology applications. During the event, a smart sensor was shown and its functioning was explained. The sensor was meant to be installed within woody debris to monitor its movements along streams. Then, to further a potential smart sensor application, some experiments were carried out using a small portable flume. During these experiments, different plastic inserts with different cut-out shapes were installed in the median cross-section of the flume. Then, matchsticks and little twigs from trees were used as debris floating downstream. These experiments aimed at having an understanding of how the flow was affected by different obstructions and how debris interacted with obstructions. By installing a sensor within the woody debris, information could be retrieved on woody debris transport and its impact on structures. Behind the stand, on a TV screen, pictures taken from different SENSUM field sites were shown in a loop. In the 2022 SciTech Showcase, from 8.30 am to 6.30 pm, more than 400 people attended the event.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2022
 
Description Seminar at Durham University 
Form Of Engagement Activity A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach National
Primary Audience Other audiences
Results and Impact GB gave seminar on SENSUM and SCaRP projects to Geography Department, University of Durham
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2024
 
Description UKRI Constructing a Digital Environment Webinar talk 
Form Of Engagement Activity A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach National
Primary Audience Other audiences
Results and Impact Webinar given in the UKRI constructing a digital environment webinar series, which led to discussion and potential new collaborations using sensor technology as well as potential future impact case study
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2022
URL https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQUDHnH_hWs&t=1s&ab_channel=ConstructingaDigitalEnvironment