Towards a better understanding and monitoring of levees behaviour to mitigate flooding risks

Although the river levees have been utilized for land protection by the earliest civilized societies over 4000 years ago, they are becoming increasingly crucial for our safety today. This heightened importance is due to the industrialization of many regions, which has exponentially increased the value of protected areas. This issue is rapidly becoming a critical concern in many European countries and beyond, particularly in light of the impacts of global climate change on regional weather patterns. While both the design of new embankments and the maintenance of existing ones aim to prevent structural failures, they follow distinct procedures. The challenge of understanding the inner composition and actual state of conservation of existing structures and their foundations requires comprehensive on-site investigations and careful surveys. On the other hand, given their extensive length, developing cost-effective strategies and procedure for rapidly assessing the health state and detecting local anomalies in their geotechnical behaviour is demanding. To address this challenge, numerous methodologies based on new technologies, such as geophysical tests, remote sensing, fibre optical-based sensors and deep learning, are continually being proposed and examined. This intervention, while not an exhaustive review of new approaches, aims to critically illustrate the state-of-art methods for monitoring and site investigation of river embankments, supplemented with some examples.