[SoC] GSoC 13 WR 3 – Hydrologically controlled landslides susceptibility tool for uDig

[Marco Foi]

Hi mates!

I’m Marco and I am working on the development of a tool to assess
susceptibility of hydrologically controlled shallow landslides.
The software will be based on the Ph.D. Thesis in Environmental Engineering
by Lanni C. (2012) and will consist of a model available for use within
the uDig/JGrass Spatial Toolbox

These are the tasks I’ve been doing during this third week:

• What did I do this week?

I still had to work on building the knowledge required to understand how to
carry on the actual implementation.
I used some of the introductory resources pointed me by Riccardo Rigon:
these lifted me to a better understanding of the domain than the one I had
reached by directly reading the complex Lanni's Ph.D. Thesis.

Water movements in the soil:
http://www.slideshare.net/SlidesIdrologia/10-acqua-neisuolirev1
Generation of lateral outrun:
http://www.slideshare.net/SlidesIdrologia/12-pgenerazione-deldeflusso

Since I could also get the hands on the "research code" written in R by
Cristiano Lanni for testing the algorithm, I had to gather a minimum
understanding of the S language to follow the procedures and to have his
code running on my laptop.
I used a couple of exhaustive resources (in Italian):

- Introduction to R:
http://www.slideshare.net/SlidesIdrologia/9-introduzione-r by Riccardo
Rigon and Matteo Dall’Amico
- Il linguaggio R: concetti introduttivi ed esempi
http://cran.r-project.org/doc/contrib/nozioniR.pdf by Vito M. R.
Muggeo and Giancarlo
Ferrara

Late in the week I could finally start reading and commenting the R script
to match its routines with what stated in the reference paper(*)


• What will I be working on next week?

- I will keep studying the R code with the intent of splitting it in
discrete sub-procedures.
[Side note not relevant to GSoC but to my MSc Thesis: Lanni's code was
clearly developed for research purposes with a trial-and-error approach.
Due to this, it exhibits even to an absolute R-newbe like me, chances for
improvement. I will discuss the interest of this with my University Tutor.]

- Hopefully I will have enough time to start learning the basics of the
JGrassTool framework so to be able to start the iterative design of the
Spatial Toolbox Tool


• Did I meet with any stumbling blocks?

- Still the most complex task was (and still is) quickly gaining the needed
hydrology background for understanding what I am doing.. ..but I feel that
something is actually getting into my lazy brain ;-) For sure this helped
making the job of managing R basics a comparatively trivial goal!


Best regards,
Marco


(*) Lanni, C., Borga, M., Rigon, R. and Tarolli, P. (2012) Modelling
shallow landslide susceptibility by means of a subsurface flow path
connectivity index and estimates of soil depth spatial distribution. *Hydrology
and Earth System Sciences*, 16(11), pp. 3959-3971.
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