A New Methodology for Mapping Past Rockfall Events: From Mobile Crowdsourcing to Rockfall Simulation Validation

Abstract

Rockfalls are one of the most common natural hazards in mountainous areas that pose high risk to people and their activities. Rockfall risk assessment is commonly performed with the use of models that can simulate the potential rockfall source, propagation and runout areas. The quality of the models can be improved by collecting data on past rockfall events. Mobile crowdsourcing is becoming a common approach for collecting field data by using smartphones, the main advantages of which are the use of a harmonised protocol, and the possibility of creating large datasets due to the simultaneous use by multiple users. This paper presents a new methodology for collecting past rockfall events with a mobile application, where the locations and attributes of rockfall source areas and rockfall deposits are collected, and the data are stored in an online database which can be accessed via the WebGIS platform. The methodology also presents an approach for calculating an actual source location based on viewshed analysis which greatly reduces the problem of field mapping of inaccessible source areas. Additionally, we present a rockfall database in the Alpine Space that has been created by the presented methodology, and an application of collected data for the calibration and validation of two rockfall models (CONEFALL and Rockyfor3D).