Application of 3D Photo-reconstruction techniques in Geomorphology: Examples through different landforms and scales

Recent developments made in tri-dimensional photo-reconstruction techniques (3D-PR), such as the use of Structure from Motion (SfM) and MultiView Stereo (MVS) techniques together, have allowed obtaining high resolution 3D point clouds. In order to achieve final point clouds with these techniques, only oblique images from consumer un-calibrated and non-metric cameras are needed. Here, these techniques are used in order to measure, monitor and quantify geomorphological features and processes. Three different applications through a range of scales and landforms are presented here. Firstly, five small gully headcuts located in a small catchment in SW Spain were monitored with the aim of estimat…

Quaternary eustatic fluctuations and biochronology of vertebrate-bearing deposits correlated with marine terraces in Sicily

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…

Predicting storm triggered debris flow events: application to the 2009 Ionian-Peloritan disaster (Sicily, Italy)

Abstract. The main assumption on which landslide susceptibility assessment by means of stochastic modelling lays is that the past is the key to the future. As a consequence, a stochastic model able to classify a past known landslide scenario should be able to predict a future unknown one as well. However, storm triggered landslide events in the Mediterranean region could pose some limits on the operative validity of such expectation, as they typically result by a randomness in time recurrence and magnitude. This is the case of the 2007/09 couple of storm events, which recently hit north-eastern Sicily resulting in largely different disaster scenarios. The purpose of this study is to test wh…

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…