In recent decades, wildfires have become a serious threat worldwide, producing disasters in the natural and anthropogenic environment as well as serious economic losses. One of wildfire’s major impacts is soil erosion, as it may cause major problems in both the physical and anthropogenic environment and seriously affect the landscape. This study investigates the soil erosion rate changes in areas affected by wildfires and uses, as a pilot area, the drainage basin of the Pinios earth-filled dam located in the Ilia Regional Unit, western Greece, which has suffered serious erosion changes after a wildfire event. For this purpose, the Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation (RUSLE) is applied in GIS software, and the soil erosion rate changes in the selected investigation area are estimated at different time intervals. Specifically, soil erosion rate changes are calculated by importing the factors from the RUSLE equation in the GIS software and uses as a dependent variable the cover management factor C, which is strongly influenced by large destructive fires. The models that are produced are compared with each other by collating average annual soil erosion maps and rates before the fire, immediately after the fire and for the existing conditions occurring in the pilot area.

Landslide monitoring using geotechnical, UAV, GNSS and MTInSAR instrumentation

The use of GIS for various types of data is considered to be of high importance, mainly because it is bringing together information from multiple sources. In addition, the new Internet technologies and applications of global world maps, like Google Maps, give the opportunity to build systems that the geographical information can be recorded and administrated by many users from anywhere. This kind of GIS systems is suitable for Business Administration, or Science, or Government Organizations, which need GIS systems with multiple users from many places and multiple kind of information. This system is defined as GISΜΑ (Geographic Information System Multi Administration). In GISMA many users may input the data and use the information from different distance. Each user has specific permissions of use of data as the administrator sets. In this work, the basic principles and rules of a building GISMA system are evaluated and an application is presented based on data and GIS techniques for the slope instability studies. Data obtained from historical landslide occurrences were verified with new locations obtained from high resolution orthophotos and Google Earth application. Landslide areas were mapped using Arc Map and finally the Landslide Inventory for the Achaia’s Prefecture was created.