MORPHEUS - GeoMORFHomEtry throUgh Scales for a resilient landscape

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, the combination of DoD (Dem of Difference) and Sediment Connectivity (SC) has emerged as a keys property of geomorphic systems to understand the sediment dynamics in the basins at different scale. To this end, several techniques are being applied from data collection (pre-processing LiDAR data, collection of SfM datasets) and high-resolution data will be analysed through geomorphometric techniques (DoD and SC) to depict sediment dynamics with respect to different natural and anthropic targets of interest. Moreover, the results of the analyses will be validated based on field surveys aimed at quantifying the effect of geomorphic and connectivity variations in the study areas. The present contribution is related to the PRIN 2022 MORPHEUS project, that aims to study the evolution of the landscape over time through the use of remote imagery, geomorphometric analyses and indexes, sediment sources mapping and DoD analyses, to advance our knowledge for increasing landscape resilience and for a new sediment management perspective. The project study areas range from the local-catchment scale (< 15 km2) to the regional scale (> 200 km2) to have a whole spectrum of applications encompassing Large Infrequent Disturbances (LIDs, i.e. Vaia storm) impact assessment and contrasting semi-natural and anthropized environments. The selected study areas encompass several catchments located in contrasting (morphological and anthropic pressure diversity) landscapes of northern Italy and featuring different sediment transport processes (e.g., bedload, debris flows). The variable scale of the analyses leads to the choice of different types of areas for an investigation related to the reach, catchment, and regional scale. The present work reports the state of the art of the analyses carried out in selected study areas of the project. In particular, we will contrast the results obtained in catchment impacted by the above-mentioned different forcings, in order to understand sediment dynamics spatio-temporal variation, both at basin scale and at regional scale.