Sharing Soil and Building Geophysical Data for Seismic Characterization of Cities Using CLARA WebGIS: A Case Study of Matera (Southern Italy)

Abstract

In the context of seismic risk, studying the characteristics of urban soils and of the built environment means adopting a holistic vision of the city, taking a step forward compared to the current microzonation approach. Based on this principle, CLARA WebGIS aims to collect, organize, and disseminate the available information on soils and buildings in the urban area of Matera. The geodatabase is populated with (i) 488 downloadable geological, geotechnical, and geophysical surveys; (ii) geological, geomorphological, and seismic homogeneous microzone maps; and (iii) a new Digital Surface Model. The CLARA WebGIS is the first publicly available database that reports for the whole urban area the spatial distribution of the fundamental frequencies for soils and the overlying 4043 buildings, along with probability levels of soil-building resonance. The WebGIS is aimed at a broad range of end users (local government, engineers, geologists, etc.) as a support to the implementation of seismic risk mitigation strategies in terms of urban planning, seismic retrofitting, and management of post-earthquake crises. We recommend that the database be managed by local administrators, who would also have the task of deciding on future developments and continuous updating as new data becomes available.

New Challenges for Seismic Risk Mitigation in Urban Areas

“…Similar studies in Italy are performed for other cities like Matera (Tragni et al, 2021), Rome (Marcucci et al, 2019), and Firenze (D'Amico et al, 2008), as well as small villages like Mirandola (Tarabusi and Caputo, 2017) and Cavezzo (Lai et al, 2020), both located in the Po plain and strongly struck by the 2012 Emilia seismic sequence (Luzi et al, 2013). Worth mentioning is the intensive studies that have been performed after the 2016-2017 Central Italy seismic sequence (Michele et al, 2016) to obtain detailed microzonation maps in the 138 most damaged municipalities (Hailemikael et al, 2020).…”

Soil-building resonance effect in the urban area of Villa d’Agri (Southern Italy)

“…Up to now the site-city interaction effect has been evaluated throught numerical simulation approaches (e.g., Kham et al 2006;Ghergu and Ionescu 2009;Padrón et al 2009;Schwan et al 2016). Recently, Agea-Medina et al (2020) evaluated the probability of resonance effect in several districts of the Alicante and Elche municipalities, while Pinzón et al (2019) and Tallini et al (2020) and have produced soil-building resonance level maps based on numerical relations provided by seismic regulations, and Gallipoli et al (2020) and Tragni et al (2021) by an extensive collection of experimental data on urban soils and buildings.…”