Improving the understanding of the structural health of natural landforms (e.g., mountain slopes, coastal cliffs) and man-made earthen infrastructure (e.g., levees, tailings storage facilities) over time has gained significant traction in recent years. This is due in part to a number of widely publicized catastrophic failures such as the Brumadinho tailings storage facility failure in 2019 and many recent avalanches in the Alps [1] as well as major improvements in computational algorithms and supercomputer technologies. The objective of this proposed minisymposia focused around the “Monitoring for site characterization” theme is to collate a snapshot of the current state-of-the-art in detecting precursors to failure by means of real time monitoring. A wide range of contributions is suitable for this broad topic, such as (but not limited to): - Suitability of monitoring technologies for brittle and ductile types of failures - Understanding of large landslides in high alpine environment - Reliability of monitoring equipment in harsh environments - Is real-time monitoring really “real-time”? - Combined monitoring systems for effective monitoring: geotechnical and geophysical monitoring, on-site and remote - Emerging monitoring technologies - Criteria for assessing suitability of monitoring technologies for various applications - Quantification of uncertainty: statistical techniques and physics-based modelling - Open-source tools for data integration and analysis