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Estimating rockfall release frequency from blocks deposited in protection barriers, growth disturbances in trees, and trajectory simulations

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Abstract

The spatial and temporal quantification of rockfall frequency remains a major challenge in mountain environments, especially also in terms of rockfall management. Approaches that have been used traditionally to quantify rockfall frequency include historical records, remote sensing, or in situ monitoring, but have been shown repeatedly to suffer from a lack of completeness or to rely on rather short time series (of a few years) that are, in addition, limited to small areas. As such, they normally cannot meet the stringent requirements of hazard and risk analyses. Here, we propose a new procedure coupling field analysis of rockfall deposits in mitigation structures and growth disturbances in tree-ring series with three-dimensional (3D), process-based rockfall modeling to estimate rockfall frequencies for individual cliff compartments. This procedure has been tested on a slope in the Swiss Alps (La Fory, Sembrancher VS), where rockfall triggered from a 38 hm2 cliff to threaten a 1-km-long section of the road to the Grand St. Bernard tunnel and the local railway line. Based on 84 rockfall deposits retrieved from 420-m-long protection barrier and growth disturbances in trees over the 1994–2017 period, we estimate rockfall hazard to between 0.043 and 0.348 events yr–1 at various locations on the slope. In total, we used 68,680,000 rockfall simulations to translate hazard values into rockfall frequencies at the cliff level. Converging release frequencies between tree-ring analyses (0.99–1.35 events yr–1 hm–2) and values obtained from deposits in the protection barrier (0.82 events yr–1 hm–2) confirm the reliability of our procedure. Despite remaining limitations, our approach enables precise quantification of rockfall release frequency in a holistic and reproducible manner both in space (a few hm2) and time (several decades), and thus yields the data needed for hazard and risk mapping. We therefore recommend, where applicable, to include this procedure in future rockfall management strategies.

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Acknowledgements

M.S. acknowledges financial support from the Division for Forest, River Engineering and Landscape, Canton of Valais and the Hazard Prevention Division from Swiss Federal Office for the Environment (FOEN). ETNA is member of Labex OSUG.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Université Grenoble Alpes, INRAE, UR ETNA, 2 rue de la papeterie, 38402, St-Martin-d’Hères, France

    Manon Farvacque, Robin Mainieri, Franck Bourrier & Nicolas Eckert

  2. Climate Change Impacts and Risks in the Anthropocene, Institute for Environmental Sciences, University of Geneva - Bd, Carl-Vogt 66, CH-1205, Geneva, Switzerland

    Manon Farvacque, Christophe Corona, Jérôme Lopez-Saez & Markus Stoffel

  3. Université Clermont Auvergne, CNRS GEOLAB UMR - 4 rue Ledru, 63057, Clermont-Ferrand, France

    Christophe Corona

  4. Department of Earth Sciences, University of Geneva, rue des Maraîchers 13, CH-1205, Geneva, Switzerland

    Markus Stoffel

  5. Department F.-A. Forel for Environmental and Aquatic Sciences, University of Geneva - Bd, Carl-Vogt 66, CH-1205, Geneva, Switzerland

    Markus Stoffel

  6. Université Grenoble Alpes, INRAE, UR LESSEM - 2 rue de la papeterie, 38402, St-Martin-d’Hères, France

    David Toe

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  1. Manon Farvacque
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  2. Christophe Corona
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Correspondence to Manon Farvacque.

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The original online version of this article was revised: The authors regret that the version of Figure 4 that appears in the original article is incorrect as it was split in two.

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Farvacque, M., Corona, C., Lopez-Saez, J. et al. Estimating rockfall release frequency from blocks deposited in protection barriers, growth disturbances in trees, and trajectory simulations. Landslides 19, 7–18 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10346-021-01719-0

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