Abstract
This paper presents a quantitative multi-temporal analysis performed in a GIS environment and based on different spatial information sources. The research is aimed at investigating the land use transformations that occurred in a small coastal terraced basin of Eastern Liguria from the early 1950s to 2011. The degree of abandonment of cultivated terraced slopes together with its influence on the distribution, abundance, and magnitude of rainfall-induced shallow landslides were accurately analysed. The analysis showed that a large portion of terraced area (77.4%) has been abandoned over approximately sixty years. This land use transformation has played a crucial role in influencing the hydro-geomorphological processes triggered by a very intense rainstorm that occurred in 2011. The outcomes of the analysis revealed that terraces abandoned for a short time showed the highest landslide susceptibility and that slope failures affecting cultivated zones were characterized by a lower magnitude than those which occurred on abandoned terraced slopes. Furthermore, this study highlights the usefulness of cadastral data in understanding the impact of rainfall-induced landslides due to both a high spatial and thematic accuracy. The obtained results represent a solid basis for the investigation of erosion and the shallow landslide susceptibility of terraced slopes by means of a simulation of land use change scenarios.
Highlights
Temporal variation in land use and land cover (LULC) represents one of the main environmental factors controlling the occurrence of natural phenomena like landslides [1,2] and floods [3,4,5,6]
In Europe, due to the significant social and economic changes which occurred after the Second World War [28], many hilly and mountainous regions have experienced severe and accelerated slope degradation issues led by farmland abandonment [29,30,31,32,33,34]
This paper describes the use of different multitemporal spatial information aimed at quantifying land use modifications affecting agricultural terraced slopes in a small coastal catchment located within the Cinque Terre National Park
Summary
Temporal variation in land use and land cover (LULC) represents one of the main environmental factors controlling the occurrence of natural phenomena like landslides [1,2] and floods [3,4,5,6]. In the last twenty years, numerous studies have considered the effects of changing land use scenarios in the analysis of landslide susceptibility [7,8,9,10,11,12], hazard [13,14], and risk [15,16]. Forest logging can decrease the positive hydro-mechanical effects of vegetation (e.g., soil reinforcements by roots, reduction of rainfall infiltration and pore water pressure by evapotranspiration processes) [17,18], causing an increase in the proneness of slopes to erosion phenomena like mass movements and runoff [19,20]. Among the indirect human-related land use modifications, the abandonment of farming areas can be considered by far one of the most relevant [21,22,23,24,25,26,27]. Abandoned slopes may become source of risk scenarios when located in the proximity of urban areas [43,44]
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