Climate resilient earthwork design using green infrastructure

Geotechnical infrastructures are affected by their surrounding environment. Any failure that occurs to these infrastructures will create delays, cause socioeconomical costs and most importantly can be dangerous and deadly. One of the important parameters to consider is the interaction between soil, plant and atmosphere, also known as Soil-plant-atmosphere interaction (SPAI). vegetation can create tensile pore pressures within the soil which increases the soil's strength, improving its safety; but due to plant transpiration, it will also cause the soil to shrink and swell, which will lead to cyclic volume change and serviceability issues. As mentioned, vegetation cover has positive and negative effects, so it is the aim of this project to model this effect as accurately as possible and to investigate its effect on safety and serviceability, and propose guidelines to manage vegetation on earthworks, to both use it to our advantage and maintain and preserve the green cover.
To do this, a comprehensive model integrating both the ecohydrological processes and the geotechnical aspects of the problem, needs to be developed to model the soil-plant-atmosphere (SPA) interactions. For this purpose, state-of-the-art numerical modelling will be used. The steps mentioned below cover an overall outline of the research's progress:
1) Integrate ecohydrological processes with geotechnical aspect,
2) Create a comprehensive model of soil-plant-atmosphere interaction,
3) Identify suitable case studies,
4) Perform risk analysis for future climate conditions.