Monitoring and evaluating the stability of soil slopes: A review on various available methods and feasibility of acoustic emission technique

Landslide is considered as one of the major natural hazards that cause enormous social and economic losses. Some techniques have been introduced to monitor the stability of slopes, such as the global positioning system (GPS), the geographic information system (GIS), aerial photography, and inclinometers. Each one of these offers advantages against others, but at the same time also possesses different limitations. Acoustic emission (AE) has recently been recognized as one of the feasible techniques to monitor soil slope. This article addresses issues involved in application of AE techniques for soil slope monitoring. If it is properly instrumented, AE could provide effective solutions for detecting early activities related to landslide development and giving early warning to such failures.