Skip to content

Teaching Material of the Belvedere Glacier Summer School

This repository contains the learning material for the Summer School "Design and Implementation of Topographic Surveys for Territorial Monitoring in Mountain Environments", organized at the Belvedere Glacier (Italian Alps) by the Section of Geodesy and Geomatics of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (DICA), Politecnico di Milano.

This Teaching Material was supported by the EGU Higher Education Teaching Material Grant 2023

The Summer School

In 2023, the 10th edition of the Summer School, organized by the Section of Geodesy and Geomatics within the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (DICA) at Politecnico di Milano, was curated. The Summer School, titled "Design and Implementation of Topographic Surveys for Territorial Monitoring in Mountain Environments", is aimed at undergraduate and graduate students in Civil and Environmental Engineering, Geoinformatics and Architecture.

The main objective of the Summer School is to provide students with practical experience in the field of topographic land monitoring in mountain environments, a crucial topic that is often only taught in theory during classes. In particular, the Summer School focuses on surveying the Belvedere Glacier, a temperate debris-covered alpine glacier, located in the Anzasca Valley, municipality of Macugnaga, Italy, to monitor the glacier's annual evolution. The 10th edition of the Summer School took place from July 23rd to July 28th 2023.

The Summer School is part of a long-term monitoring activity of the Belvedere Glacier, where annual in-situ GNSS and UAV photogrammetry surveys have been carried out since 2015 to derive accurate and complete 3D models of the entire glacier, allowing the derivation of glacier velocity and volume variations over the last 10 years (Ioli et al., 2022). We believe that the integration of the Summer School into an ongoing research project adds value to the experience, as it allows students to work in close contact with young tutors who are passionate about the topic and contribute to the acquisition of data that will be effectively used by researchers.

The Summer School is part of the "Passion in action" initiative organized by Politecnico di Milano. At the end of the experience, students receive a certificate of attendance, and the course is awarded 3 CFUs, which are included in the Diploma Supplement attached to the degree. We expect between six and twelve students to attend the Summer School. In previous editions of the Summer School, an average of ten enrolled students participated.

The program of the Summer School lasts one week and uses the Zamboni Zappa Hut (2070 m. a.s.l.) as the main base for the activities. These begin on Sunday, with the transportation of survey material to the Zamboni Zappa Refuge and a plenary seminar introducing the participants to the Summer School activities. From Monday to Thursday field activities take place on the glacier. These activities include the planning of topographic and photogrammetric surveys with UAV's, measurements with GNSS and laser scanner instruments, and initial data processing. On Friday, students organize the preliminary results that can be derived from the measured data and present their work to a panel of professors and researchers from the DICA department.

All data collected on Belvedere Glacier, including the 3D models of the glacier, the orthophotos, and the Digital Surface Models (DSM), are published as open data in a public repository on Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7842348).

On this website we have created a comprehensive section for teaching material on the basics of photogrammetry, GNSS and GIS, including the basics of raster processing, planning UAV photogrammetry acquisitions, and using common structure-from-motion software packages such as Agisoft Metashape. More information about the research activities on Belvedere Glacier can be found on the research group's website https://labmgf.dica.polimi.it/projects/belvedere/.

We strongly believe that this summer school and its learning material offer a unique opportunity for students to gain practical experience in the field of topographic land monitoring, which is crucial in the current scenario of climate change.

Course contents

  1. Introduction: This module gives a brief introduction to the course, providing a general overview of the summer school and the main topics covered during the course.

  2. Module 1: this module describes the monitoring activity carried out on the Belvedere Glacier with UAV photogrammetry and GNSS.

  3. Module 2: this modules give an introduction to photogrammetry.

  4. Module 3: this module gives an introduction to GNSS positioning.

  5. Module 4: this module gives an introduction to GIS and spatial data analysis.

  6. Module 5: this modules gives an introduction on the stereo processing from fixed-time-lapse cameras.

  7. Belvedere Open Data: this module describes the open data collected during the summer school.

  8. Software: this module describes the software used during the summer school.

  9. References: this module provides a list of references used during the summer school.