Climate change, soil erosion and slope instability in selected agricultural areas of Italy and Southern Britain

Project Information

Grant agreement ID: EV5V0257

Project closed

Start date 1 October 1993

End date 30 September 1996

Funded under

• Specific research and technological development programme (EEC) in the field of the environment, 1990-1994

Total cost No data

EU contribution No data

Coordinated by

University of Sussex
United Kingdom

Objective

To describe the impact of the interactions of climate,
geology, soils, landuse and landuse change on soil erosion
and slope instability in selected agricultural areas in
central and southern Italy and Southern Britain during the
last 15 years, and to assess the likely impacts of future
climate and landuse changes.


To use information from field surveys, interpretation of
aerial photographs, local government records and data from
other independent surveys to reconstruct and map landuse and
landuse change, to map landslides (including date(s) of
occurrence) and the distribution of erosion-sensitive sites,
and to map the extent of remodelled terrains. The selected
study areas are in Basilicata, Marche and Toscana, within
Italy, and Sussex (East and West), Kent, Surrey and
Hampshire, with the UK, and cover a range of lithologies and
climatic conditions.

To undertake detailed analysis of daily rainfall records for
all the study areas and, in particular, to apply
autoregressive heteroscedasticity (ARCH) analysis to these
data. To characterise the physical and chemical properties of
the soils and subsoil from the erosion- and landslide-
sensitive sites in the study areas. To use stability
analysis techniques to reconstruct conditions at failure for
selected landslides, and to develop and extend models for
rainfall-triggered landslides. To calibrate and test existing
models for soil erosion within the study areas.

The field data and the models will be used to develop
predictions of the likely impacts of different climate and
landuse change scenarios on erosion and landsliding within
the study areas.

Fields of science

CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.

• natural sciences › earth and related environmental sciences › geology › lithology
• natural sciences › earth and related environmental sciences › atmospheric sciences › climatology › climatic changes

Programme(s)

• FP3-ENV 1C - Specific research and technological development programme (EEC) in the field of the environment, 1990-1994

Topic(s)

• 0103 - Climate change impacts

Call for proposal

Data not available

Funding Scheme

CSC - Cost-sharing contracts

Coordinator

University of Sussex

• EU contribution: No data
• Address: Falmer ; BN1 9RH Brighton ; United Kingdom
• Total cost: No data

Participants (1)

Universitá degli Studi di Siena

Italy

• EU contribution: No data
• Address: 3,Via della Cerchia ; 53100 Siena
• Total cost: No data