Abstract
Abstract. Small reservoirs are widely used for storing water, especially for irrigation purposes. During the last decades, in Italy many of these reservoirs have been dismissed, becoming an untapped resource. As a matter of fact, maintenance problems connected to these structures together with their natural tendency to silt have favored the use of other water supply resources such as withdrawal from wells. The increase of drought periods and the high water volume demand for agricultural purposes suggest to evaluate a full and rational use of all water resources, leading to a rediscovery and enhancement of untapped resources. Specifically, this research focuses on small reservoirs and on their potential contribution to a sustainable water management in agriculture. Unfortunately, there are no reliable data on their number, spatial distribution and potential storage volume. The aim of this work is to define reservoir spatial distribution and evaluate potential available water volumes. The upper Tiber river basin has been selected as a case study for the methodology proposed. The work starts from the acquisition and re-elaboration of the old census of small reservoirs, evaluating, through GIS and regression techniques, the distribution over the territory and the available volumes. Then the reservoir census and the derived database were updated for the period from 2015 up to 2019 introducing combined computational procedures of remote sensing techniques and GIS, based on satellite images and water index calculation. The results of the semi automatic procedure used show good performance in lake identification, making it a promising tool for a fast and reliable water body identification and evaluation in wide areas.
Highlights
The topic of small reservoirs has been, in the history of Italy, of fluctuating interest: from the boom of the 1960s and 1970s to the abandonment in the following years, up to a very recent new interest for these hydraulic works distributed all over the national territory, which derives from the extreme fluctuations in water availability
At the turn of the 1960s and 1970s thousands of small reservoirs were built in Italy with the aim of having a considerable water reserve distributed over the territory to the benefit of agriculture
The importance of having detectable data on the map led to the development of a WebGIS system, so the updating, analysis and spatial analysis of database can all be conducted in a high-performance way (Casadei et al, 2018), with the possibility of developing applications to quantify the water resource and risk
Summary
The topic of small reservoirs has been, in the history of Italy, of fluctuating interest: from the boom of the 1960s and 1970s to the abandonment in the following years, up to a very recent new interest for these hydraulic works distributed all over the national territory, which derives from the extreme fluctuations in water availability. At the turn of the 1960s and 1970s thousands of small reservoirs were built in Italy with the aim of having a considerable water reserve distributed over the territory to the benefit of agriculture. This was possible thanks to a far-sighted agricultural policy that offered great financing to companies for the building of these works. The problem of drought mitigation, one of the most serious problems on the planet linked to climate change, lies in the management of these reservoirs They could be a possible tool to preserve agriculture and protect water resources
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