Geo‐hydrological phenomena, including gullies, contribute significantly to soil erosion and land degradation. To address this, proper management of basins and hillslopes should consider the mechanism, timing, and location of gully development and how gullies interact with other hillslope processes. Yet, conventional modelling techniques for such processes are rare, frequently being limited to applications of only single processes and typically requiring high‐resolution input data. Further, existing tools for characterizing basins and hillslopes tend to be based on static descriptions of geo‐environmental conditions, and thus are not effective for modelling changes such as the seasonal triggering conditions of gully phenomena over time. This study proposes a method to integrate open remote sensing data (Sentinel‐2) and an existing modelling tool (LANDPLANER) using simplified input data to better predict and forecast gullies’ spatial and temporal occurrence. The study investigates the seasonal conditions responsible for the triggering of gullies at the catchment scale using different erosion modelling schema in the Toscana region of Central Italy. Geomorphological gully inventory data were collected and used as benchmarks to test the proposed approach. The results show that the occurrence of gully erosion in the studied region changes seasonally, and the proposed method was able to effectively discriminate spatial and temporal differences of the gully phenomena. The proposed method can be applied to similar regions worldwide, allowing for the investigation of gully erosion over time, even in places with limited data availability.
Managed Aquifer Recharge (MAR), the intentional recharge of aquifers, has surged worldwide in the last 60 years as one of the options to preserve and increase water resources availability. However, estimating the extent of the area impacted by the recharge operations is not an obvious task. In this descriptive study, we monitored the spatiotemporal variation of the groundwater temperature in a phreatic aquifer before and during MAR operations, for 15 days, at the LIFE REWAT pilot infiltration basin using surface water as recharge source. The study was carried out in the winter season, taking advantage of the existing marked difference in temperature between the surface water (cold, between 8 and 13 °C, and in quasi-equilibrium with the air temperature) and the groundwater temperature, ranging between 10 and 18 °C. This difference in heat carried by groundwater was then used as a tracer. Results show that in the experiment the cold infiltrated surface water moved through the aquifer, allowing us to identify the development and extension in two dimensions of the recharge plume resulting from the MAR infiltration basin operations. Forced convection is the dominant heat transport mechanism. Further data, to be gathered at high frequency, and modeling analyses using the heat distribution at different depths are needed to identify the evolution of the recharge bulb in the three-dimensional space.
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