0000000000801776
AUTHOR
E. Rotigliano
Assessment of hydro-erosive processes in small steep coastal basins in Liguria and Sicily, Italy
The steep Mediterranean catchments underwent drastic socio economic changes in the last decades. Moreover, these basins are also subject to climate variability and potential future climate change effects. Due to mechanization in agriculture a lot of surfaces changed from terraced vineyards and olive growth to abandoned land. The terraced areas are less productive and more cost and labour intensive and hence cannot compete with a highly mechanized agriculture. Furthermore, tourism based on the natural and cultural heritage of the region is more and more important for the income of the inhabitants. The abandonment has effects on the entire landscape system in terms of hydrological dynamics, s…
The great landslide at Portella Colla (Madonie, Sicily)
The South Western area of the Madonie Mountains is affected by large landslides; the major one developed starting from Portella Colla down to the Imera Settentrionale river, for a maximum length of about 6.2 km in a NE-SW direction. The study of the landslide, with the aim of reconstructing the geological, geomorphological and evolutionary aspects, has been carried out using integrated methodologies, including some geophysical investigations (in particular geoelectrical prospecting). The landslide is complex and characterized by superficial and deep gravitational deformations. The movement began in the Upper Pliocene and it is still active. The origin and evolution of the landslide are link…
Predicting storm triggered debris flow events: application to the 2009 Ionian-Peloritan disaster (Sicily, Italy)
Debris flows are shallow landslides triggered by extreme meteorological events and propagating into the drainage lines of a slope as a fluid. A debris flow susceptibility map depicts the spatial probability for future phenomena to be triggered in a given area. Stochastic approaches are widely used in landslide studies for the assessment of the susceptibility. In fact, they allow to obtain a predictive function which relates a response variable (presence/absence of landslides) and a set of physical-environmental variables which are expected to control the slope failure phenomena. Future landslide occurrences are typically predicted by studying a past landslide inventory, under the basic assu…
Assessment of Gully Erosion Susceptibility Using Multivariate Adaptive Regression Splines and Accounting for Terrain Connectivity
In this work, we assessed gully erosion susceptibility in two adjacent cultivated catchments of Sicily (Italy) by employing multivariate adaptive regression splines and a set of geo-environmental variables. To explore the influence of hydrological connectivity on gully occurrence, we measured the changes of performance occurred when adding one by one nine predictors reflecting terrain connectivity to a base model that included contributing area and slope gradient. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves and the area under the ROC curve were used to evaluate model performance. Gully predictive models were trained in both the catchments and submitted to internal (in the calibration cat…
Indicators of rivers geomorphological functionality, application of the EU Water Framework Directive in Sicily (Italy)
Many river systems in Europe suffer from human pressure. For this reason the European Water Framework Directive (WFD; 2000/60/EC) was created for river basin and floods management. In 2010 the Italian Environmental Minister issued the WFD and a protocol for the stream hydromorphological evaluation, analysis, and monitoring was established (IDRAIM). The Morphology Quality Index (MQI) is part of this procedure and defines the deviation of present geomorphic reach situation from reference conditions. It is composed by Indicators of Geomorphological Functionality (IGF), Indicators of Artificiality (IA) and Indicators of Channel Adjustments (ICA). The present work aims at illustrating the calcula…