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

Inventory of italian rocky coasts aimed at the improvement of the knowledge of their evolution

The establishment of a working group on rocky coast in Italy in 2006 have permitted to organize several activities (meetings and excursions) and therefore to prepare an inventory of Italian rocky coasts. At these activities have participated the authors of the present abstract, which have indicated from time in time the characters of the visited coasts performed in these two years. Such coasts was selected in order to have a wide inventory where cliff in different geological regimes (tectonically stable, volcano-tectonically active) and lithology (limestone, terrigenous, volcanic) are represented. The aim of this group is to improve the knowledge of the factors having a role in the evolutio…

Analisi del dissesto da frana in Sicilia

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…