Anagrafe della ricerca

The ongoing increasing frequency of extreme events is expected to impact more severely on the environment and the infrastructures. Understanding sediment dynamics, considering these forcings, is thus of extreme importance for putting into place effective risk mitigation measures for a more resilient landscape. To address such an issue, in recent years, sediment connectivity (SC) has emerged as a key intrinsic property of geomorphic systems representing the potential for sediment transfer through system compartments. In literature, SC has been explored either from a structural or a functional standpoint. Structural SC is derived by analyzing mainly topographic data and deriving connectivity indices that have been widely applied. Such an approach was found informative in defining preferential mass movements, sediment pathways and sink areas, setting hazard priorities to sediment source areas, characterizing landslide sediment provenance, and assessing the impact of natural and anthropic structures (roads, terraces, dams) on sediment fate and hazard exposure. Functional SC tries instead to include temporal scales and process effects into such a framework, for example by measuring morphological variations derived from multi-temporal topographic information through DEM of Difference (DoD) techniques. The MORPHEUS project aims at providing improved tools and related guidelines for applying multi-scale and multi-temporal SC analyses, based on geomorphometric techniques. The proposed approach represents, to a great extent, a novel paradigm in connectivity-related investigations, leading to a significant advance in knowledge for increasing landscape resilience and for a new sediment management perspective.