Detecting small-scale landslides along electrical lines using robust satellite-based techniques

Abstract

Robust Satellite Technique (RST) was applied to detect small-scale landslides along electrical lines in Sicily, Italy. To this end, electrical poles were selected as targets within the study area. The methodology, implemented in Google Earth Engine (GEE) environment, exploits the Copernicus Sentinel-2 platform to identify anomalous land cover variation, in terms of Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), possibly related to small displacements affecting electric poles. Since the applied methodology is based on land cover change, dense vegetation plays an important role in detecting small-scale landslides. Therefore, we targeted months with the highest vegetation density, such as February, March, and April from 2016–2023. The results obtained reveal that out of the five targeted electrical poles, four of them exhibited anomalies > 2-sigma indicating significant changes in land cover possibly related to local ground movement as confirmed by aerial photos collected in the period 2015–2023. Our findings reveal anomalies of −2.17 and −2.36 on 7/17/2017 and 9/05/2017 for pole 1. For pole 2, the results show an anomaly of −2.02 on 8/11/2018. The results also indicate anomalies of −4.40 and −2.99 on 7/09/2021 and 9/27/2022 for pole 3. For pole 4, the findings show an anomaly of −3.10 on 1/18/2019.

Keywords

• Small-scale landslide
• electrical infrastructure
• Robust satellite technique (RST)
• Sentinel-2
• Google Earth Engine (GEE)