ABSTRACT: Among the dominant processes taking place in a river basin, especially mountain ones, sediments
creation and transport play a key role in morphological processes. Studies usually focus on big mass movements,
such as landslides and debris flows, or on wide spread slope erosion due to rainfalls, while bank erosion is
neglected or not considered essential for sediment budget at basin scale. Nevertheless, authors consider bank
erosion a process that deserve more careful studies; not only the sediment share from bank erosion is not
negligible in steep mountain rivers, but also the process can threat structures on river sides due the possibility to
have limited, but still significant, mass collapse of bank sections during intense events. The paper present an
attempt to monitor bank erosion in a section of a river in Northern Italy Alps and to put it in relation with
weather and water discharge. Survey campaign was set up at regular time intervals, or after particularly intense
rainfalls, and uses a Terrestrial Laser Scanner (TLS) to acquire the bank surface. The tool was developed
internally, at Politecnico di Milano, to meet requirements about low cost level and good accuracy. Successive
acquisitions of point clouds were elaborated, via an ad-hoc MatLab code, to determine erosion, or deposition,
volumes of sediments. These volumetric results have been evaluated in relation with rainfalls and freeze-thaw
cycles looking for a relationship between environmental conditions and bank failures. Some interesting results
are shown, such as a relation between erosion rates and temperature or water flow in the river. The path to a
complete process understanding and modelling is long, however the results reported can be considered a first
step towards objective