Abstract:
The growing threat of large-scale composite and cascading disasters highlights the urgent need for related research, which is often hindered by challenges such as remote disaster-prone areas, difficulties in monitoring, and data scarcity.The Sichuan Basin, adjacent to the Tibetan Plateau and the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau, is a transition zone characterized by significant topographic variation, active tectonic movements, and abundant rainfall.These conditions contribute to continuous surface material movement and landscape transformation, leading to frequent large-scale landslides and floods in the region.Such disasters often occur in groups, sequences, or cascades, resulting in substantial casualties, property damages, and environmental degradation.They also pose serious threats to the safety and construction of major infrastructure projects, such as the Ya′an-Kangding Expressway and the Chengdu-Lanzhou Railway.While single-type disaster research is well-established both domestically and internationally, with numerous monitoring systems in operation, studies on multi-disaster scenarios remain limited due to the difficulty in identifying suitable research targets and the lack of monitoring samples.To address this gap, a multi-disaster monitoring system was established in the Baishahe catchment in Dujiangyan City, China, an area near the epicenter of the Wenchuan earthquake that has experienced numerous cascading, grouped, and compound disasters.Since 2010, a comprehensive monitoring system has been running to capture multi-scale and multi-disaster processes across slopes, gullies, and rivers contexts.Focusing on mass-energy transfer and early-warning needs for cascading disasters, monitoring parameters were selected based on mass (water, soil) and energy (movement).A low-cost Internet of Things (IoT) sensor network was deployed for long-term monitoring.Long-term monitoring data reveal that elevation plays a dominant role in disaster heterogeneity, with disaster intensity weakening from upstream to downstream.The data also demonstrate the effectiveness of hazard control engineering in reducing regional risks.This study offers valuable insights into target selection, monitoring framework construction, and associated data analysis for multi-disaster research.