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Vulnerability to relative land subsidence in the Po river delta ‐ Venice region

Proceedings article published in 2015 by Luigi Tosi, Cristina Da Lio, Tazio Strozzi, Urs Wegmüller, Pietro Teatini
This paper is available in a repository.
This paper is available in a repository.

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Preprint: policy unknown
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Postprint: policy unknown
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Abstract

The northern Adriatic coastland is characterized by low-lying environments such as deltas, lagoons, wetlands, and farmlands, with the interaction between land subsidence and eustacy that represents the main threat for the survival of the coastal transitional environments. This superposition effect, which is usually known as “relative sea level rise” (RSLR), is here termed “relative land subsidence” (RLS) because more suitable to visualize the process of loss in ground elevation with respect to the sea level not only in coastal sectors directly affected by the marine ingression but also in the inland coastal plain. In fact, because of its complex hydraulic setting, RLS may severely impact the northern Adriatic coastland, increasing the risk of river flooding, damages to buildings and other manmade structures, and enhancing the saltwater contamination of soils and aquifers, thus causing land desertification. On the topics of land subsidence and eustacy, much has been written for this area, however an updated classification of the coastal vulnerability to the RLS does not exist. In this work we provide a map of the vulnerability to RLS between the Po River Delta and the Venice region based on land displacements, eustacy, and the physiographic setting of the coastal region, e.g., ground elevation and distance to the sea. Ground vertical movements and the digital elevation model have been obtained by SAR-based Interferometry on ALOS and Envisat images, respectively, with sea level rise scenarios derived from long time series of local tide gauge stations and the most updated IPCC projections.