Editorial for the Special Issue: Innovative numerical methods for soil internal erosion processes

In today’s society, with environmental loads acting with unexpected great magnitude and increasingly populated areas, earth structures for water containment and water defence must be designed and monitored with utmost care, to reduce the risk where the exposure increases [Jongman et al., 2012]. Soil internal erosion is regarded to as one of the major causes of earth embankment and dam failures, leading in the past to high death toll and economic losses [Foster et al., 2000; Richards and Reddy, 2007]. Moreover, internal erosion poses a threat of broader impact to the natural and built environment, as it may lead to slope failure, soil subsidence and structure damages, and it is of concern also in industrial engineering problems such as the sand production in oil wells [Climent et al., 2014; Fox and Wilson, 2010; Gao et al., 2022; Sterpi, 2003; Vardoulakis et al., 1996; Zhang et al., 2020]. Since its establishment in 1993, the European Working Group on Internal Erosion of Dams, Dikes and Levees, and their Foundations (EWG-IE) represents a community committed to share their interest and knowledge in soil internal erosion related matters. The Group organizes Annual Meetings, the last three being held in 2018 in Milano, Italy [Bonelli et al, 2018], in 2019 in Vancouver, Canada [Fannin, 2019], and in 2022 in Sheffield, UK [Bowman, 2022]. To maintain a link among the EWG-IE members during the Covid-19 pandemic, between 2020 and 2021 online workshops on diverse topics were organized by local groups. Given the interest raised at the workshop on “Innovative numerical methods for soil internal erosion processes”, the local organizers decided to open a call to the entire scientific community and to serve as guest editors of a themed issue on the journal Geomechanics for Energy and The Environment. The valuable contents of the submissions, that bring up a well-balanced mix of topics involving the soil internal erosion, reflect that the call reached a broadly interested and lively community of researchers. This editorial aims at outlining the relevant key points of these contributions and placing them in the context of the state of the art.