Morphological response to river engineering and management in alluvial channels in Italy

TLDR: In this article, the authors reviewed all existing published studies and available data, and aimed to reconstruct a general outline of the main channel adjustments that have occurred in Italian rivers during the past 100 years.

About: This article is published in Geomorphology.The article was published on 2003-03-01 and is currently open access. It has received 580 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Channel pattern & Fluvial.

Figures

Fig. 5. Trends of average channel width in the braided reach of the Piave River (the reach is 115 km long). Channel width was measured along 94 transects on historical maps and aerial photographs (modified from Surian, in press).

Fig. 3. Channel narrowing along the Brenta River: (A) topographic map (I.G.M.) of 1887; (B) aerial photograph of 1999. Besides narrowing, decrease in intensity of braiding, increase in channel sinuosity and change in channel pattern (from braided to wandering) have taken place during the last century.

Fig. 4. Trends of bed-level adjustments. (A) Po River: minimum annual river stage at the gauging station of Cremona (modified from Lamberti and Schippa, 1994). (B) Arno River in the Lower Valdarno reach: changes in bed bottom elevation obtained from longitudinal profiles and cross sections of different years (modified from Rinaldi and Simon, 1998). Horizontal hatched line: trend of stable (dynamic equilibrium) conditions before incision; continuous curves: fitting exponential decay functions.

Table 3 (continued )

Table 2 Recent channel adjustments in Italian rivers and relative causes and effects

Fig. 2. Channel incision along the Arno River in the Lower Valdarno–Pisa Plain reach. (A) Example of typical change in cross section, with limited bed lowering from 1936 to 1954, and intense incision from 1954 to 1978. Total bed level lowering from 1844 to 1978 was 6.3 m. (B) Bridge 2 km upstream of the previous section, with exposed piles due to the incision.