The scientific and technical approach

The monitoring concept for the Taroko National Park includes a distributed network of seismic and weather stations equipped with up to two cameras, as well as hydrometric gauging and sampling of the rivers. Seismic data can be used to track hillslopes mass wasting – landslides and rock falls – but also for a host of other processes. This gives us an integrated picture of the entire landscape. Hydrometric data allows insight to activity patterns and efficiency states of both, hydraulic processes and sediment transport. Thus, we are able to seamlessly connect hilsslope and channel processes and study the sediment cscade from source to (almost) sink, i.e., the mouth of the Liwu river to the Pacific ocean. Meteorologic data, recorded at minute intervals provides constraints on the overall external boundary conditions and allows tracking storms through the catchment to resolve the spatially migrating effects on the landscape. Hourly camera imagery at different zoom levels provides ground truth data on slope and channel activity but also to asses more subtile changes of the landscape, such as vegetation growth, episodic fluvial activity of small ephemeral streams and synoptic information on meteorological conditions (incl. rain drops).

All stations are designed to to operate autonomously and telemeter the high resolution parameters they sense in near real time (every hour) to the GFZ Potsdam where the raw data are pre-processed, partly automatically analysed and distributed to participating partners. The stations are decisively designed to operate (and survive) the extreme conditions in this active landscape. They can operate up to one week without solar power input, a usual case when a typhoon hits the catchment and drops metres of precipitation in a few days. The stations can be maintained and manipulated remotely from the GFZ head quarters to account for changed boundary conditions or anticipated reasons to e.g. increase sensitivity and resolution.

In addition to these continuous monitoring efforts, we gather high resolution aerial imagery of activated slope parts and changed channel reaches to independently constrain the measurements by the distributed stations.