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

Abstract

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.