A new monitoring strategy to control land movements. The Veneto Region test area

Anthropogenic land subsidence has widely been affecting the Veneto Region; northern Italy; since the past century. Groundwater withdrawals for industrial; domestic; and agricultural uses; exploitation of mineral water; thermal water for health treatment; methane-bearing water; and peat oxidation in reclaimed farmlands produced a land settlement varying in time and space throughout the area. Moreover; natural consolidation of the Quaternary deposits and tectonics of the pre-Quaternary basement contribute to increase ground surface lowering. Different survey techniques; with different characteristics; have been adopted to control land subsidence. To overcome the limits that characterize each single method and to enlarge the knowledge on regional land subsidence; an integrated monitoring method has been designed to accurately and reliably keep land movements under control in the study area. We combine five earth observation techniques; i.e. spirit leveling; Continuous Global Positioning System (CGPS); Differential GPS (DGPS); Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR); and Interferometric Point Target Analysis (IPTA); together over about the last ten-years; and homogenized and integrated their results in both the time and space domains. The application of this Subsidence Integrated Monitoring System (SIMS) provides a new complete and dependable picture of the vertical displacements in the Veneto Region never available before