A new monitoring strategy to control land movements. The Veneto Region test area

Anthropogenic land subsidence has widely been affecting the Veneto Region, northern Italy, since the past
century. Groundwater withdrawals for industriai, domestic, and agri cultura! uses, exploitation of minerai
water, thermal water for health treatment, methane-bearing water, and peat oxidation in reclaimed farmlands
produced a land settlement varying in time and space throughout the area. Moreover, natural consolidation of
the Quaternary deposits and tectonics of the pre-Quaternary basement contribute to increase ground surface
lowering. Different survey techniques, with different characteristics; have been adopted to contro! land
subsidence. To overcome the limits that characterize each single method and to enlarge the knowledge on
regional land subsidence, an integrated monitoring method has been designed to accurately and reliably keep
land movements under contro! in the study area. We combine five earth observation techniques, i.e. spirit
leveling, Continuous Global Positioning System (CGPS), Differential GPS (DGPS), Interferometric
Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR), and Interferometric Point Target Analysis (IPTA), together over about the
last ten-years, and homogenized and integrated their results in both the time and space domains. The
application of this Subsidence Integrated Monitoring System (SIMS) provides a new complete and
dependable picture ofthe vertical displacements in the Veneto Region never available before.