Land Cover Change and Flood Risk in a Peri-Urban Environment of the Metropolitan Area of Rome (Italy)
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Land Cover Change and Flood Risk in a Peri-Urban Environment of the Metropolitan Area of Rome (Italy) Fabio Recanatesi 1
& Andrea Petroselli
2
# Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract
Land cover change (LCC) is the most important factor in causing ecosystems services (ES) loss. In Mediterranean basins, coastal areas historically suffer from great anthropic pressure. These changes influence runoff, and municipal authorities often cannot estimate the impact of complex land cover transitions. In such context, the great urban and industrial development of the towns surrounding the city of Rome (Italy) represents a paradigmatic case study. In this paper, land cover evolution in a watershed located in a peri-urban environment has been studied in terms of LCC and the consequential flood risk. The information concerning land cover transformations was analyzed in following time scenarios: 1954, 1967 and 2018. The identification of occurred rainfall events, and the application of a combined hydrological and hydraulic modelling, allowed the estimation of flooded areas and volumes. The obtained results allowed to quantify the increase in the flood risk, that was more pronounced in the part of the selected area that has been more extensively interested by the soil sealing. The increase in the flood risk was larger in the hypothesis of a rainfall occurring when the soil is dry, like it can happen for the common case of summer precipitations. Keywords Land cover change . Risk assessment . EBA4SUB; FLO-2D . GIS; flood mapping
1 Introduction United Nations declared in 2012 that world population is becoming increasingly urban and estimated that approximately 53% of the world’s population is concentrated in cities, with more than 75% of the population being concentrated in North America, Europe and Oceania. For this reason, it is expected that people living in cities will account for two-thirds of the * Fabio Recanatesi [email protected]
1
Department of Agricultural & Forestry Sciences (DAFNE), Tuscia University, Viterbo, Italy
2
Department of Economics, Engineering, Society and Business Organization (DEIM), Tuscia University, Viterbo, Italy
Recanatesi F., Petroselli A.
world’s total inhabitants by the year 2050, giving rise to environmental impacts on global scale (United Nations 2012). Consequently, understanding and predicting the causes, processes and consequences of Land cover change (LCC) has become a major challenge to anyone involved in environmental risk assessment and loss in ecosystems services (ES). Such impacts will be greater in coastal zones due to their great accessibility and, for this reason, Mediterranean coastal wetlands are particularly fragile because they are exposed to human activities such as farming systems and constant urban sprawl (Li et al. 2010; Munafò et al. 2013; Pascual-Aguilar et al. 2015). Because of this, nowadays coastal ecosystems are among the most valuable ones in the world because of the many different and significant ES they provide. Coastal wetlands, for instance, play an importan
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