Abstract. Wireless sensor networks can be a very useful technology for monitoring remote and hostile environments. In this paper, we firstly report on our experience with landslide monitoring, and analyze the issues and the challenges we had to face in programming and deploying a suitable and useful wireless sensor network infrastructure. Following, we discuss how, within the CASCADAS project, we are contributing to the development of a novel component-based framework to facilitate the design and development of autonomic and situation-aware communication services for the use in modern network scenarios. Such a framework can become a useful tool to facilitate the development of easy-to-deploy, robust, and flexible sensor-network-based monitoring systems and, in particular, of landslide monitoring systems.