Local Geodatabase as Tool for Monitoring the Landslide “Thracian Cliffs”

The goal of the presented research was to establish sound basis for studying the current geodynamic processes at single landslide area located between the villages of Topola and Bozhurets at the Bulgarian Black Sea coast. The investigated zone has been under high anthropogenic pressure in the last decade by constructing several touristic and holiday properties some of them already collapsed because of lack of preliminary monitoring of the surface motions in it. In order to register past and ongoing surface motions, we used data from satellite-based synthetic aperture radar (SAR), which is the main instrument of the Sentinel-1 (S-1) mission. To this end, created was local geodatabase (LGDB) into which collected all available information concerning this specific zone including, geological and techtonic maps, hydrology inventories, geodetic data from local geodynamic GNSS networks, information for land use/land cover in the said coastal zone, optical imagery from unmanned aerial systems and satellites, to name a few, besides the SAR data. Currently, such detailed and well-organized information for the studied region is not available in centralized repository for public use. Other objective of this study was to create and keep updated the mentioned LGDB using free and open source processing tools, such as QGIS, ingesting publicly available data from different sources e.g. Copernicus data and products. Key element of this research was to harmonize the already available data and to create methodology for their integration into the LGDB as well as to establish a protocol for future data acquisition from the mentioned sources and their integration into the geodatabase. The established LGDB allowed synergetic interpretation of the data thus providing better modelling of the studied geodynamic processes by large number of experts in different application domains. The authors are confident that the resulting information product is of high quality and allows seamless integration the produced LGDB into regional datacubes that are gaining popularity for machine learning applications in Earth sciences and even are used to offer products for the wide public.