This week’s user story is about monitoring a landslide area in Ecuador. In February 2020, the San Rafael waterfall collapsed, and regressive erosion started around the Coca River, which put the environment and indigenous communities in the surrounding area in danger. 

The study area is located in Northeast Ecuador, at the River Coca, between the San Rafael Waterfall and the Coca Codo Sinclair Hydropower Dam and close to the volcano Reventador. They analyzed the erosion event with Sentinel-1 SAR data and included in the validation the PS Tropical Normalized Analytic Biannual Archive basemap from June to November 2019 and PlanetScope Imagery between 2020-02-14 and 2020-03-2021. 

The researchers emphasized that remote sensing and GIS are crucial for assessing and analyzing landslide areas and particularly significant for better regional risk management.

Click here to read the article and learn more about the research.