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Virtual reality is a technological development that, among others, has revolutionized Earth sciences. Its advantages include an opportunity to examine places otherwise difficult or impossible to access and it may also become an important component of education, fostering a better understanding of processes and landforms, geohazard awareness, and an appreciation of geoheritage. This paper reports on the GeoVT project, which aims to create a platform to build and disseminate Virtual Field Trips (VFTs) focused on geomorphology, natural hazards associated with geomorphological processes, and geoheritage sites. To put the GeoVT project in context, an overview of applications of VR in geosciences is provided. This paper subsequently proceeds with a presentation of the project and the GeoVT Authoring application, which is an innovative platform designed to help teachers and students, followed by brief presentations of a number of VFTs developed within the project. They address themes such as fluvial landforms and valley development, coastal landforms, evidence of past glaciation, coastal erosion, wildfire effects, mud volcanoes, and landslides.

Shifting cultivation is widely practiced in many tropical mountainous watersheds. Agricultural practices are changing with the intensification of activities and the development of industrial monocultures associated with increasing land use and the use of pesticides and fertilisers. These changes have consequences for the evolution of sediment transfers in watersheds, resulting in new vulnerabilities for the inhabitants. This article shows the evolution of structural connectivity over 5 years in the village of Houaylack-Vangven, located in northern Laos, and its potential links with agricultural diffuse pollution. To develop a structural source-to-sink model to understand sediment transfers, our method was based on open-access data and various geographical tools. Field surveys were conducted to identify areas vulnerable to erosion and sediment transfers. The sources and sinks were then located using remote sensing techniques and image interpretation to then characterise connectivity rates. Finally, the relationship between the sources and sinks was analysed by graph theory to explore the potentialities for assessing the connectivity and exposure of sediment sinks. The main results are twofold: sinks coincide with areas at risk of contamination by pesticides and fertilisers, and the structural connectivity increases with the increasing of the source surfaces (swidden plots) due to the ongoing agricultural transition.