Ben's research interests include slope stability analysis and landslide prediction; use of soil reinforcements in earth retention, subgrade improvement, and slope stability; unpaved road behavior; vegetation-soil interaction; and management of water-sediment transport. His investigative approach involves an array of tools including numerical modeling, laboratory work and full-scale field testing. Professor Leshchinsky’s research is based in a variety of disciplines, broadly encompassing geotechnical engineering, water resources, and forestry.

LiDAR Automated Landslide Detection Algorithm - Contour Connection Method

Landslides are a common hazard worldwide that result in major economic, environmental and social impacts. Despite their devastating effects, inventorying existing landslides, often the regions at highest risk of reoccurrence, is challenging, time-consuming, and expensive. Current landslide mapping techniques include field inventorying, photogrammetric approaches, and use of bare-earth (BE) lidar DEMs to highlight regions of instability. However, many techniques do not have sufficient resolution, detail, and accuracy for mapping across landscape scale with the exception of using lidar bare earth digital elevation models (DEMs), which can reveal the landscape beneath vegetation and other obstructions, highlighting landslide features, including scarps, deposits, fans and more. Current approaches to landslide inventorying with lidar include manual digitizing, statistical or machine learning approaches, and use of alternate sensors (e.g., hyperspectral imaging) with lidar.

A novel algorithm was developed here at OSU to automatically and consistently detect landslide deposits on a landscape scale. The proposed method is named as the Contour Connection Method (CCM) and is primarily based on bare earth lidar data requiring minimal user input, dependent on general landslide geometry.  Furthermore, in addition to the detection capabilities, CCM also provides an opportunity to be potentially used to classify different landscape features. This is possible because each landslide feature has a distinct set of metadata that provides a unique signature for each landslide. 

Mechanically Stability Earth Wall True Abutments - Strength Limit State and Service Limit State

Mechanically Stabilized Earth (MSE) Walls are an increasingly common means of earth retention for a variety of applications. Their function is simple and efficient – use tensile reinforcements and facing elements to enable soil to retain itself as well as surcharge loads. This coupled stability problem, combined with an assumed stress distribution based on earth pressure principles allows for a simplified design methodology to evaluate reinforcement tensile strength required for an adequately stable structure. The lateral earth pressure approach has been refined to include a variety of geometries, but little insight exists into the stability and design requirements for MSE structures supporting a footing – an increasingly important function, especially in context of true bridge abutments or other critical structures.  Furthermore, it's service state performance is difficult to evaluate. Ongoing work in Ben's research group is examining the strength limit state and service limit state of these inherently complex structures.

Unpaved Roads and Turbidity - Evaluating Methods of Preventing or Removing Turbid Effluent from Unpaved Roads

Despite evolution of BMP’s set forth to avoid forest roads influencing watersheds by crossing or running parallel to stream systems home to fish, significant  amounts of unpaved roads are within this critical area. Efforts to evaluate current and prototypical methods to disconnect possible sediment sources from forest roads to fish habitats are concurrent to the objectives of the College of Forestry. This project outlines a comparison of current and novel approaches to road sediment sequestration, emphasized at critical segments to forest infrastructure confluent to stream systems that serve as a resource to wildlife. This field project included field testing of several sediment romoval techniques, including geotextiles, sand filters and biomass under a road undergoing hauling with simulated rainfall. More to come soon.

Equipment Anchor Design - An Analytical Solution

Cable yarding systems are a versatile means for transporting materials in mountainous terrain in situations that does not allow for conventional harvesting methods such as ground skidding or shovel-logging. Cable yarding usually requires anchored guylines to support the tower and an anchor for the skyline.  Anchored guylines usually depend on available stumps or trees. Where these are not available, mobile anchors such as bulldozers or skidders can be used.  Mobile anchors have an advantage of known resisting capacity, as opposed to trees and stumps, but there are no well-defined design criteria for the application of such a system. They also have the attractive property of being less likely to fail catastrophically under excessive line tensions, as a resisting soil that gradually yields allows cable tensions to decrease. An analytical design solution for mobile anchor capacity based on force equilibrium analysis has been developed. This design function presents a quantifiable loading capacity for use of equipment as primary or auxiliary anchoring system.