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Floods are the most common natural hazards causing damage to properties and loss of life worldwide. They are not preventable but vulnerability assessments, hazard mitigation, and effective emergency management plans can reduce their impacts and facilitate recovery actions. Floods can have different impacts depending on the local physical conditions and on the social context represented by the economic and cultural patterns of a specific community. Social vulnerability is the susceptibility of social groups to the adverse impacts of natural hazards, including disproportionate death, injury, loss, or disruption of livelihood. Therefore, the social vulnerability analysis becomes of primary importance in understanding the main factors influencing the capacity of a specific community to anticipate, cope with, and recover from a flood event. In this context, this paper investigates the correlation between flood hazard and socio-economic factors across the Basilicata Region (southern Italy). The aim of this research is to evaluate flood hazard and social vulnerability index through a Geographic Information System (GIS) approach. Multivariate factor analysis was applied in this work to construct an overall social vulnerability index which was combined with the flood hazard distribution. Our results underline the presence of 107,587 people with a high level of both flood hazard and social vulnerability.

Sandy beaches are the result of a dynamic interaction among physical conditions, biological processes and the anthropic impact (essentially linked to the natural resource direct or indirect exploitation). Monitoring the health state of coastal areas is a fundamental tool for land-use management. Moreover, integrated sedimentological studies with multidisciplinary methodologies are increasingly needed. This study aims to monitor the evolution of Torre Guaceto beach (Brindisi) over different seasons. The study area is part of a protected marine reserve characterised by a relatively slight human impact and a significant availability of previous data that allows us to observe the natural dynamic eAects on the health state of the beach. The research was developed by adopting different techniques in order to investigate the foreshore and the shoreface sector of the beach. The geomorphological investigation, carried out with the terrestrial laser scanner and the optical total station, aimed to quantify the variations of sediment volume of the beach, while the sedimentological and petrographical analyses were conducted to deBne the sand textural and compositional characteristics throughout different sampling seasons; Bnally, Delft3d software was applied to analyse the eAects of the dominant wave motion on the sedimentary dynamics.

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This study focuses on the analysis of sandy beaches by integrating sedimentological, geomorphological, and geophysical investigations. The beach represents an extremely variable environment where different natural processes act simultaneously with human activities, leading to the gathering of different methodologies of the Earth Sciences to study its evolution in space and time. The aim of this research is to propose a potential procedure for monitoring the morpho-sedimentary processes of sandy beaches by analyzing the textural and compositional characteristics of the sands and quantifying the volumes involved in the coastal dynamics. The study area includes two Apulian sandy beaches (Torre Guaceto and Le Dune beach) that are representative of the coastal dynamics of a large sector of the central/northern Mediterranean Sea involving the southern Adriatic Sea and the northern Ionian Sea. Sedimentological and ecological investigations allowed to describe the textural and compositional characteristics of the beach sands by interpreting their sand provenance and the physical/biological interactions within the beach. The topographic surveys carried out with a Terrestrial Laser Scanner and an Optical Total Station, aimed to quantify the variations of sediment volume over time, whereas the Delft3d software was applied to analyze the effects of the dominant wave motion on the sedimentary dynamics. Lastly, the geophysical techniques which included Sub Bottom Profiler procedures, Ground Penetrating Radar investigation, and resistivity models enabled us to calculate the sand sediment thickness above the bedrock.