In April, the Gaidar Institute for Economic Policy organized a survey on the willingness of investors to expand production capacity. And their willingness turned out to be the highest in the last 11 years. Analysts explain the obtained results by the course of import substitution, the increase in the level of economic certainty, the unwillingness to give way to Chinese competitors, and the need to change economic ties

However, each company has its own history. The persons interviewed by the editorial staff of the “Geoinfo” journal think that sometimes it does not matter where the product comes from, its characteristics is more important.

Sometimes one have to refuse imported special machinery and equipment if the necessary service maintenance is not guaranteed. It happens that there is no alternative to import, and if it there is, its quality is an order of magnitude lower

Small businesses would be willing to invest in their production if the government support measures were the same as for large companies.

This year, the Ministry of Economic Development of the Russian Federation plans to revise 800 else regulatory legal acts that duplicate each other or contain excessive requirements for business. 

The relevant measures are carried out within the framework of the so-called regulatory guillotine. In addition to reducing the volume of documents, it implies reducing inspections and digitalizing services.

 The moratorium on most scheduled business inspections has been extended from this year until 2030. They have remained only at objects of extremely high and high risk of harm. Unscheduled ones can be initiated on the basis of risk indicators, but they take place seldom in practice.

 Also this year, the Government of the Russian Federation plans to complete the digitalization of licensing-permitting activities. 180 new types of authorization documents will appear on the public services portal.

 Experts interviewed by the editorial staff of the “GeoInfo” journal gave an ambiguous assessment of this supervisory-regulatory reform. They believe that there are pluses, but there are enough minuses. Due to the decrease in control, it has become more difficult to defend one's interests and defend oneself from unscrupulous market participants.

The Sea of Azov is the most continental and one of the smallest and shallowest on our planet. Some residents of the surrounding regions do not even consider it a full-fledged sea as it is too shallow! In ancient times, it was also not considered a sea and was called the Meotian swamp.

The “swamp” does not like this attitude, and it proves to people, as it is able, that it is the sea. Formerly it stranded ships and even mercilessly sent sailing and steam ships to the bottom. And now it threatens to “eat” surrounding lands, to become more by hundreds of hectares in the Rostov region, Krasnodar Territory and new Russian regions. According to the forecasts of the staff of the Southern Scientific Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences (SSC RAS), this will happen in the coming decades. Some structures will have to be moved or inevitably lost, something else can be saved at the expense of strengthening the coasts.

A representative of the SSC RAS told the editorial staff of the Geoinfo journal about the causes and predicted consequences of the destruction of sea coasts. An engineering surveyor report about the methods of protection of the Black Sea and Azov Sea coasts, and a builder explained how to build in the coastal zone so that building objects do not “spread”.

We bring to the attention of the readers a review of the materials of the article “Importance of results obtained from geotechnical monitoring for evaluation of reinforced soil structure – case study” [1], published once before in the Journal of Applied Engineering Sciences in English. The authors of that article are Marian Drusa and Josef Vlcek, who work at the Department of Geotechnics, Faculty of Civil Engineering, University of Zilina (Zilina, Slovakia).

The mentioned article [1] demonstrates the important role of geotechnical monitoring of the behavior of reinforced soil structures during the construction and operation of transport infrastructure facilities in difficult geological conditions. Unfortunately, such sort of structures are often designed and built on the basis of poorly performed geotechnical surveys, or they are simply incorrectly designed in relation to the specific conditions of the construction site. This can lead to large deformations of the structure, loss of its stability, its reduced service life. At that, restoration work can be difficult and expensive.

During the modernization of the Bratislava-Trencin railway line (Slovakia), part of the embankment was reinforced with a retaining wall made of filledup soil reinforced with geosynthetics. The geotechnical monitoring data were compared in the article [1] with the results of finite element modeling of this reinforced soil structure.

The Italian “Maccaferri” multinational company develops efficient and environmentally friendly design solutions and manufactures products for the construction, geoengineering and mining industries based on conventional gabions and mattress-type gabions, geogrids, geotextiles, geocomposites, connected reinforced concrete blocks, etc. This company offers unique innovative systems for soil reinforcement, bank and coast protection, disaster risk reduction, etc. At that, the desired results can only be obtained with adequate site investigations, proper product selection, suitable and accurate design, and adherence to the necessary technologies during construction.

Since 1994, the “Maccaferri” company has had a division in Russia, representative offices in other CIS countries and its own plant in the Moscow region (maccaferri.com/ru/). 

We invite readers to get some information about the systems of the “Terramesh” family produced by the “Maccaferri” company for the construction of efficiently working retaining walls, embankments and slopes of reinforced soil for road construction with money and time saving.

The simultaneous use of both a software package for working with structural solutions and а geotechnical software complex makes it possible to increase the accuracy of calculations. This has a positive effect on the economic justification of a project and on the overall reliability of a designed structure. 

The presented paper gives a substantiation of this statement using a specific example of calculations in the midas GTS NX, LIRA and SKAD software packages.

In the beginning of this year, at the end of the Zvenigorod educationalscientific practice for 4th year bachelors, the traditional conference “The Day of Science” was held. This year, this event was also timed to coincide with the seventieth anniversary of the Department of Geocryology, Faculty of Geology, Lomonosov Moscow State University (MSU). And at the same time, the presentation of the “Arktika” geodynamic test site of MSU, which was opened in the territory of the Zvenigorod biological station of MSU, took place. Over the past five years, long-term industrial partners of the faculty (such companies as PETROMODELING, Rusgeotech, Moby Dik, Tepofol) have taken part in equipping the test site.

Taking advantage of such a convenient information opportunity, we want to speculate about what is happening with the Russian school of permafrost studies and what are the prospects for Russian scientists and manufacturers standing next to them, introducing the results of advanced studies and developments into practice. Subject to the support of the state.

We present to the attention of the readers an adapted and slightly abridged translation of the paper “A simple and empirical refraction correction method for UAV-based shallow-water photogrammetry” [1], which was published in English in the International Journal of Geological and Environmental Engineering by the WASET publisher. The authors of this paper are I.G.Yu. Partama, A. Kanno, Yu. Akamatsu, R. Inui, M. Goto, and M. Sekine from the Yamaguchi University (Yamaguchi, Japan). This article is in the open access (online) under the CC-BY-4.0 license, which allows it to be copied, translated, adapted, modified and used for any purpose (even commercial one) provided that the types of changes are noted and the original source is referred to. In our case, the reference to the original paper [1] is given at the beginning of the list of references (sources [2–11] from that list were used by the authors of the translated paper).

The aerial photogrammetry of shallow water bottoms has the potential to be an efficient high-resolution survey technique for shallow water topography, thanks to the advent of convenient UAV and automatic image processing techniques Structure-from-Motion (SfM) and Multi-View Stereo (MVS). However, it suffers from the systematic overestimation of the bottom elevation, due to the light refraction at the air-water interface.

In this study, the authors present an empirical method to correct for the effect of refraction after the usual SfM-MVS processing, using common software. The presented method utilizes the empirical relation between the measured true depth and the estimated apparent depth to generate an empirical correction factor. Furthermore, this correction factor was utilized to convert the apparent water depth into a refraction-corrected (real-scale) water depth.

To examine its effectiveness, the authors applied the method to two river sites, and compared the RMS errors in the corrected bottom elevations with those obtained by three existing methods

The results show that the presented new method is more effective than the two existing methods (the method without applying correction factor and the method that utilizes the refractive index of water (1.34) as a correction factor). In comparison with the remaining existing method, which uses linear regression and additive terms (offset) after considering correction factor, the presented new method performs well in Site 2 and worse in Site 1. And the authors found this linear regression method to be unstable when the training data used for the calibration are limited. It also suffers from a large negative bias in the correction factor when the apparent water depth estimated is affected by noise, according to the performed numerical experiment.

Overall, the good accuracy of a refraction correction method depends on various factors such as the locations, image acquisition, and GPS measurement conditions. The most effective method can be selected by using statistical selection (e.g. leave-one-out cross validation).

Epilithic lichens are among the most important constituents of ecologicalgeological systems (EGS). They perform a number of important ecological functions that determine the characteristics of each specific EGS as a whole. However, these functions have been still poorly studied, so this article characterizes a specific role of epilithic lichens in ecological-geological systems.

It is shown that epilithic lichens are among the most important components of ecological-geological systems because they cause complex relationships between abiotic and biotic constituents in EGSs. Systematics of epilithic lichens were developed according to their relationships with certain lithological-petrographic types of grounds. The confinement of crustose epilithic lichens to igneous, metamorphic, and sedimentary rocks was found. While foliose and fruticose lichens confine to disperse sedimentary soils. Epigeic lichens should be considered as a kind of epilithic lichens. An ecological-geological role of epilithic lichens in EGSs and in the formation of the ecological functions of the lithosphere (resource, geodynamic and geochemical functions) was revealed. Specific epimaterial lichens were distinguished. The substrate for them is technogenic materials of building and engineering structures of various compositions, which play a significant role in technogenic EGSs.