The use of terrestrial laser scanning in monitoring and analyses of erosion phenomena in natural and anthropogenically transformed areas

Abstract Implementation of terrestrial laser scanning creates new opportunities in the analysis of processes occurring in the environment. Terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) enables fast, precise mapping of land relief and dimensions of technical structures. TLS allows moving from traditional methods, such as point measurement, to differential analyses of a relief model. TLS allows accurate analyses of land relief changes and erosion phenomena, both in terms of the processes intensity and range, and the initial and intensifying events. The paper presents the authors’ experiment with the use of the TLS technology in erosion processes monitoring and analyses. The authors present the methodology of using TLS which contributed to the acquisition of reliable results by providing optimal conditions for the research. The paper shows the effects of laser scanning in order to analyse the intensity of soil erosion in mountainous forest area with a large number of measurement stations, which resulted in a dense points cloud. Differential model method allowed to evaluate erosion phenomena in the form of rills resulting from surface flushing, which is impossible to assess by traditional methods of erosion measurements. In the paper, we showed the necessity to choose the proper coordinate system (object or scanner) for the analysis of the landslide, depending on structure and direction of the soil masses movement. The application of the object coordinate system showed greater erosion phenomena range (ca 12%) on buttress stabilizing landslide and ca 44% on natural landslide, in which the application of the object coordinate system increases the number of observations by 40%.