Project: La gestione del sedimento nella realizzazione di servizi ecosistemici e nel controllo dei processi alluvionali.

The propoposal "La gestione del sedimento nella realizzazione di servizi ecosistemici e nel controllo dei processi alluvionali" was submitted yesterday for the call of MATTM.
The call is at this link (and it is for Geologists ?!). Actually the topics require some geology and a loto of hydrology and hydraulics. This is how the world goes.

The proposal can be found in this OSF site, called: "Gestione del Sedimento".  It is in Italian, but I will provide the translation of the following:

Abstract: The management of sediments for providing  ecosystem services and control alluvional processes. 

The project is about the management of sediments in mountains catchments with the quantitative determination of erosion and mass transport. The research is made looking at the applicatio of 2000/60 and 2007/60 EU directives.
In the project's first phase:
Hydrological analysis utilises a multi-model strategy based on GEOtop and GEOFRAME-NewAGE and other open-source models.
It is estimated the sediment availability and its connectivity to the river network, by using field surveys, data made available from previous research and models.
Transport of sediments will be will be obtained with obtained with biphasic models where water and sediment are treated separately.
Objective of the above phases is to localise the sources and the sediment residence time, to detect its interaction with anthropic works and infrastructures and determine how they (the sediments) can interact with the climatic forcings.

Objective of the application phase are:

• the production of flooding hazard and risk maps;
• the forecasting on the proximate and long period of the morphologic chages or river beds, under climate change simulated through “weather generators”.
• The estimation of the impact of hydraulic works, also back in the years. 

In the present project we will use a connectivity index to estimate the connection between hillslope (source sediment areas) and some target catchments’ elements (the river network, specific streams, the outlet). Sediment source areas are, partially already available from existing databases (CNR IRPI, Provincia Autonoma di Trento, Regione Sicilia), from field surveys and from remote sensing. These data are partially already available from previous projects (ASI MORFEO, CLIMAWARE, AQUATERRA, GLOBAQUA) and by the local Institutions (Geological Service of Trento Province and Regione Sicilia).

Terrein analysis will be coupled with models of landslide triggering, able to account for climate and soil use variability (in space and time) as described as variation of:

• intensity and frequency of precipitation,
• precipitation from snow to rain,
• phenology of vegetation cover

Two areas will be studied, one in the Alps and another in Apennines. The first is the Avisio torrent, and in in particolar the subcatchment closed at the Stramentizzo dam (Molina di Fiemme, TN), analysed with detailed especially in some specific parts.

The Apennine basin is the Giampilieri torrent in Messina Province.

References (that appears in the State-of-Art):

Badoux, A., Andres, N., and Turowski, J.,M., Damage costs due to bedload transport processes in Switzerland, Nat. Hazards Earth Syst. Sci., 14, 279-294, 2014.

Bertoldi et al., 2006 Bertoldi, G., Rigon, R., & Over, T. (2006). Impact of Watershed Geomorphic Characteristics on the Energy and Water Budgets. Journal of Hydrometeorology, 7(3), 389–403.

Berzi, D., Fraccarollo, L., Turbulence Locality and Granularlike Fluid Shear Viscosity in Collisional Suspensions (2015), Physical Review Letters, 115 (19), art. no. 194501. Comiti F., and

Farabegoli, E; Morandi, M.C.; Onorevoli G.; and Tonidandel, D.; Shallow landsliding susceptibility in a grass mantled alpine catchment (Duron valley, Dolomites, Italy), in preparation, 2018

Mao, L., Recent advances in the dynamics of steep channels, in Gravel-bed Rivers: Processes, Tools, Environments, John Wiley&Sons, Chichester, UK, 351-377, 2012.

Bracken, C., B. Rajagopalan, and E. Zagona (2014), A hidden Markov model combined with climate indices for multidecadal streamflow simulation, Water Resour. Res., 50, 7836–7846, doi:10.1002/2014WR015567.

Montgomery D.R., and Buffington J.M., Channel-reach morphology in mountain drainage basins. Geol. Soc. Am. Bull, v. 109, no. 5, pp. 596–611, 1997.

Renard, 1997 Renard, K.G., G.R. Foster, G.A. Weesies, D.K. McCool and D.C. Yoder. 1997. Predicting Soil Erosion by Water: A Guide to Conservation Planning with the Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation (RUSLE). Agr. Handbook No. 703. Washington, D.C.: USDA, Government Printing Office.

Rigon et al., 2006, Rigon, R., Bertoldi, G., Over, T. M., & Over, T. (2006). GEOtop: a distribute hydrological model with coupled water and energy budgets. Journal of Hydrometeorology, 7, 371–388.

Rosatti, G., Zorzi, N., Zugliani, D., Piffer, S. and Rizzi, A., Web Service ecosystem for high-quality, cost-effective debris-flow hazard assessment, 33-47, Env. Modelling & Software,  2018.

Smith, T.R., e F.P. Bretherton. «Stability and the conservation of mass in drainagebasin evolution.» Water Resource Research 8 (1972): 1506-1529. 


Sofia, G., Di Stefano, C, Ferro, V., Tarolli, P. (2017). Morphological similarity of channels: from hillslopes to alpine landscapes. Land Degradation & Development, 28, 1717–1728, doi:10.1002/esp.4081. 


Tarolli, P. (2016). Humans and the Earth’s surface, Earth Surface Processes and Landforms, 41, 2301–2304, doi:10.1002/esp.4059. 


Tucker et al., 2001 Tucker, G. E., Lancaster, S. T., Gasparini, N. M., & Bras, R. L. (2006). The Channel-Hillslope Integrated Landscape Development Model (CHILD), 1–32.

Wainwright, J., A. J. Parsons, J. R. Cooper, P. Gao, J. A. Gillies, L. Mao, J. D. Orford, and P. G. Knight (2015), The concept of transport capacity in geomorphology, Rev. Geophys., 53, 1155–1202, doi:10.1002/2014RG000474.