Guglielmina Adele Diolaiuti

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at University of Milan

Monitoring the snow cover variability and trends is crucial due to its significant contribution to river formation and sustenance. Using gap-filled MODIS data over the 2001–2024 period, the spatial distribution and temporal evolution of three snow cover metrics were studied: number of days, onset and end of the snow cover season across fourteen reg...

Satellite imagery from the Sentinel-2 MSI platforms provides systematic global acquisitions of high-resolution imagery of the Earth's surface with a 5-day revisit time at the equator, having a great potential for monitoring and mapping regions where the land cover is particularly sensitive to the dynamics of climate change, such as the glaciers env...

Extreme weather events are increasingly recognized as major stress factors for forest ecosystems, causing both immediate and long-term effects. This study focuses on the impacts experienced by the forests of Valdisotto, Valfurva, and Sondalo (28% of the total area is covered by forests) in Upper Valtellina (Italy) due to the Vaia storm that occurre...

Protesa tra due continenti, circondata dal mare, attraversata dalle catene montuose delle Alpi, di cui possiede l’intero versante meridionale, e dagli Appennini, l’Italia ha tra i suoi elementi di forza l’unicità derivante dalla varietà di ambienti e luoghi, dalla ricchezza in biodiversità e dalla pluralità culturale, potenziali asset strategici pe...

As the global community grapples with the urgent challenges of climate change, there is an increasing need for innovative and effective educational tools to enhance understanding and engagement with this critical issue. This paper introduces a novel pedagogical approach (the Carbon Footprint Game) that harnesses the power of gamification to educate...

In recent decades, climate change has demanded more and more attention. Consumers have the power to influence the carbon footprint of goods and services through their purchasing decisions, but to do this they need to learn more. To address this need, it is necessary to develop online questionnaires able to make people aware of which activities have...

The mechanisms underlying plant succession remain highly debated. Due to the local scope of most studies, we lack a global quantification of the relative importance of species addition ‘versus’ replacement. We assessed the role of these processes in the variation (β-diversity) of plant communities colonizing the forelands of 46 retreating glaciers...

The worldwide retreat of glaciers is causing a faster than ever increase in ice‐free areas that are leading to the emergence of new ecosystems. Understanding the dynamics of these environments is critical to predicting the consequences of climate change on mountains and at high latitudes. Climatic differences between regions of the world could modu...

Understanding the response of Himalayan glaciers to global warming is vital because of their role as a water source for the Asian subcontinent. However, great uncertainties still exist on the climate drivers of past and present glacier changes across scales. Here, we analyse continuous hourly climate station data from a glacierized elevation (Pyram...

The plastic footprint is defined as a science-based tool for quantifying the amount of plastic (in kg) one contributes to the world’s plastic waste (from plastic wraps to anything containing plastics, such as clothes). Making consumers aware of their total plastic footprint and of how it is divided among their various daily life activities can prom...

Cryoconite holes are small ponds present on the surface of most glaciers filled with meltwater and sediment at the bottom. Although they are characterized by extreme conditions, they host bacterial communities with high taxonomic and functional biodiversity. Despite that evidence for a potential niche for anaerobic microorganisms and anaerobic proc...

This study analyzed the challenges and benefits of the identification and promotion of a long-distance cycleway in high mountain areas with the aim of promoting Alpine eco- and geo-tourism. We also investigated the role of e-biking in discovering local geodiversity and geoheritage in a sustainable way. In particular, we focused on the path from Bor...

Cryoconite holes, ponds full of melting water with sediment on the bottom, are hotspots of biodiversity on glacier surfaces and host dynamic micro-ecosystems. They have been extensively investigated in different areas of the world (e.g., the Arctic, Antarctic, Alps, and Himalaya), but so far no study has described the bacterial communities of the g...

Mechanisms underlying plant succession remain highly debated. A global quantification of the relative importance of species addition versus replacement is lacking due to the local scope of most studies. We quantified their role in the variation of plant communities colonizing the forelands of 46 retreating glaciers distributed worldwide, using both...

Ice‐free areas are expanding worldwide due to the dramatic glacier shrinkage and undergo rapid colonization by multiple lifeforms, thus representing key environments to study ecosystem development. It has been proposed that colonization dynamics of deglaciated terrains is different between surface and deep soils, but that the heterogeneity between...

Microplastic (MP) contamination is ubiquitous and widespread in terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, including remote areas. However, information on the presence and distribution of MPs in high-mountain ecosystems, including glaciers, is still limited. The present study aimed at investigating presence, spatial distribution, and patterns of contamina...

This chapter focuses on the clear reduction in glacier extension that has been observed worldwide in the global warming period: this reduction has strongly affected the Alpine region that has been subjected to a much higher temperature increase than the average Earth’s one.Specifically, the chapter presents different techniques of remote-sensing an...

Ice-free areas are increasing worldwide due to the dramatic glacier shrinkage and are undergoing rapid colonization by multiple lifeforms, thus representing key environments to study ecosystem development. Soils have a complex vertical structure. However, we know little about how microbial and animal communities differ across soil depths and develo...

We propose the exploration of polar areas on Mars by a next-generation orbiter mission. In particular, we aim at studying the seasonal and regional variations in snow-deposits, which – in combination with measurements of temporal variations in rotation and gravity field – will improve models of the global planetary CO2 cycle. A monitoring of polar...

We mapped flow velocity and calving rates of the iconic Perito Moreno Glacier (PMG), belonging to the Southern Patagonian Icefield (SPI) in the Argentinian Patagonia. We tracked PMG from 2001 to 2017, focusing mostly upon the latest images from 2016–2017. PMG delivers about ca. 106 m3 day^-1 of ice in the Lago Argentino, and its front periodically...

Cryoconite holes, ponds full of melting water with a sediment on the bottom, are hotspots of biodiversity on glacier surface and host dynamic micro-ecosystems on these extreme environments. They have been extensively investigated in different areas of the world (e.g., Arctic, Antarctic, Alps, and Himalaya), but no study so far has described the bac...

Dissemination and communication of landscape features have been for long time an important goal for explorers and travellers. The description of landforms and of the processes that determine them now assume a key role in geoeducation. From this point of view, outdoor experiences represent a great opportunity to improve the scientific knowledge of s...

Most of the world’s mountain glaciers have been retreating for more than a century in response to climate change. Glacier retreat is evident on all continents, and the rate of retreat has accelerated during recent decades. Accurate, spatially explicit information on the position of glacier margins over time is useful for analyzing patterns of glaci...

Weather forecasts over mountainous terrain are challenging due to the complex topography that is necessarily smoothed by actual local-area models. As complex mountainous territories represent 20% of the Earth’s surface, accurate forecasts and the numerical resolution of the interaction between the surface and the atmospheric boundary layer are cruc...

Snow cover is particularly important in the Alps for tourism and the production of hydroelectric energy. In this study, we investigate the spatiotemporal variability in three snow cover metrics, i.e., the length of season (LOS), start of season (SOS) and end of season (EOS), obtained by gap-filling of MOD10A1 and MYD10A1, daily snow cover products...

Plastics are synthetic organic polymers playing an irreplaceable role in our everyday life. However, their massive use, improper management and end-life disposal cause plastic accumulation in the environment. Plastic contamination is ubiquitous in aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems, including mountain remote areas. The present work aimed at investi...

The cryosphere (i.e. glaciers and permafrost) and its related landforms offer a wide range of ecosystem services, thus they have strong relationships with human population. Even if these harsh environments have often been regarded as inhospitable, there is a growing amount of literature on glacial biodiversity, specifically concerning European moun...

Several anthropogenic activities have undergone major changes following the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, which in turn has had consequences on the environment. The effect on air pollution has been studied in detail in the literature, although some pollutants, such as ammonia (NH3), have received comparatively less attention to date. Focusing on...

Glaciers are continuously monitored to detect their spatial extension and time evolution since they are the best witnesses of climate changes. There is a particular interest for Italian glaciers in the Alps as there is evidence that they are melting at a faster rate than those located in other regions of the globe. The determination of the perimete...

Despite the harsh environmental conditions, glacier surfaces host metabolically active bacterial communities, especially in cryoconite holes, small ponds filled with melting water and with a fine-grained sediment at the bottom. We investigated the daily changes in transcript profiles of the microbial community of a cryoconite hole on an Alpine glac...

Climate Monitoring Satellite Application Facility (CM SAF) surface solar irradiance (SSI) products were compared with ground-based observations over the Piedmont region (north-western Italy) for the period 1990-2016. These products were SARAH-2.1 (Surface Solar Radiation DataSet-Heliosat version 2.1) and CLARA-A2 (Cloud, Albedo and Surface Radiatio...

The development of methods for quantifying meltwater from glaciated areas is very important for better management of water resources and because of the strong impact of current and expected climate change on the Alpine cryosphere. Radiative fluxes are the main melt-drivers, but they can generally not be derived from in situ measures because glacier...

VR experience during an event at Centrale dell'Acqua di Milano, Italy. Credit: MM The global Sustainable Development Goals are strongly communicated to citizens. Although the media are using classic or innovative communication processes no appraise was established on the effectiveness of these. Here for the first time, we assess the effectiveness o...

In this study, the early ecological succession patterns of Forni Glacier (Ortles-Cevedale group, Italian Alps) forefield along 18-year long chronosequence (with a temporal resolution of one year) has been reported. Bacterial and fungal community structures were inferred by high throughput sequencing of 16S rRNA gene and ITS, respectively. Besides,...

The ongoing glacier shrinkage in the Alps requires frequent updates of glacier outlines to provide an accurate database for monitoring, modelling purposes (e.g. determination of run-off, mass balance, or future glacier extent), and other applications. With the launch of the first Sentinel-2 (S2) satellite in 2015, it became possible to create a con...

The ongoing glacier shrinkage in the Alps requires frequent updates of glacier outlines to provide an accurate database for monitoring, modelling purposes (e.g. determination of run-off, mass balance, or future glacier extent), and other applications. With the launch of the first Sentinel-2 (S2) satellite in 2015, it became possible to create a con...

Alpine glaciers play a key role in our society through the production of freshwater for domestic, industrial and agricultural use. As they are severely affected by climate change, it is of crucial importance to understand their behaviour and monitor their morphological evolution, with the primary aims to estimate ice volume and mass changes. Howeve...

During the past decades, there have been attempts to offset melt at glacier ski resorts. The most important method is active glacier protection, largely based on the use of geotextiles to preserve snow cover and reduce its melt. Until 2008, a scientific evaluation of the efficiency of glacier covering strategies had never been carried out in Italy,...

The glacial masses are decreasing in different areas of the world. Glaciers are an important water reserve. The technique of photographic comparison allows studying the variations of the glacial masses in the last decades. The images produced during the project "On the Trail of the Glaciers" in 2018 in three glacial areas of the central Himalayas (...

Mountain glaciers represent an important hydrological and touristic resource, and their recent evolution provides a dramatic evidence of climate change for the general public. Glacier inventories, quantifying glacier characteristics and evolution, are an important tool to describe and manage high mountain glacier environments and Italy has develope...

Alpine glaciers respond to climate imbalance by adjusting their mass and length. In turn, these changes modify the glacial and periglacial environment, leading to increased supraglacial debris cover, the development of glacial lakes and glacier fragmentation. In this research, we investigated the evolution of Lys Glacier (Monte Rosa Group), by stud...

Abstract. The on-going glacier shrinkage in the Alps requires frequent updates of glacier outlines to provide an accurate database for monitoring or modeling purposes (e.g. determination of run-off, mass balance, or future glacier extent) and other applications. With the launch of the first Sentinel-2 (S2) satellite in 2015, it became possible to c...

Remote sensing investigations permit to map and describe at a regional scale and with a multi-temporal approach mountain glaciers. In this work, we present some results from the New Italian Glacier Inventory which we developed by analyzing high-resolution color orthophotos acquired in the timeframe 2005–2011. In particular, in this paper we focused...

The aim of the study is to analyse the surface albedo of the Ant-arctica and investigate eventual signals of variations in space and time between summer 2000/2001 and 2011/2012 by means of the GLASS albedo product. We followed a step-by-step procedure from micro- to macro-scale. At first, we analysed 95 glaciers around the continent, and we found l...

We here investigated the recent (1976–2014) evolution of the Ararat mountain glaciers, paradigmatic of the evolution of ice bodies in Western Asia and the Caucasus. We gathered ice cover maps, including debris cover from different sources, to depict glaciers’ extension, and its variation under recent climate patterns. We then gathered data of (dail...

Contamination by plastic debris has been documented in most regions of the world, but their occurrence in high mountain areas has not been investigated to date. Here we present the !rst report of the occurrence and amount of microplastic in any terrestrial glacier environment. In the supraglacial debris of the Forni Glacier (Italian Alps), we obser...

NIMBUS n.81 (Gennaio-Giugno 2019), pp 20-37, ISSN1122-4339 Asian mountain groups forming the Himalaya-Karakorum system represent one of the most important glaciated areas of the Earth outside the polar ice sheets. In the context of the project “On the trails of the glaciers”, variations of three large glaciers in Nepal and China (Kangchenjunga, Ro...

In this paper the use of different types of remote-sensing techniques for monitoring topographic changes of Alpine glaciers is presented and discussed. Close range photogrammetry based on Structure-from-Motion approach is adopted to process images recorded from ground-based and drone-based stations in order to output dense point clouds. These are t...

Debris is known to influence the ablation, topography and hydrological systems of glaciers. This paper determines for the first time how these influences impact on bulk water routing and the proglacial runoff signal, using analyses of supraglacial and proglacial water chemistry and proglacial discharge at Miage Glacier, Italian Alps. Debris does in...

Glacier darkening, or the decrease in glacier albedo over time, has been reported for glaciers in several parts of the world. In this study, we use data from the Landsat archive spanning back to 1984 to investigate the long-term evolution of surface albedo in the ablation area of 15 selected glaciers in the Ortles-Cevedale group, Central Italian Al...

We analysed the recent involution of glaciers in the Bernina group (Italy), which are shrinking thus permitting a rapid enlargement of the forelands. We delimited glacier outlines upon aerial photographs (1954 and 1981 stereo pairs analysed through an optical system) and orthophotos (2003 and 2007 digital imagines directly managed via GIS software)...

Supraglacial debris is known to strongly influence the distribution of glacier surface melt. Since melt inputs drive the formation and evolution of glacial drainage systems, it should follow that the drainage systems of debris-covered glaciers will differ from those of debris-free glaciers. This would have implications for the proglacial runoff reg...

Ahora Gorge is a 400 m deep canyon located along the North Eastern flank of Mt. Ararat (Turkey), a compound volcanic complex covered by an ice cap. In the past, several diarists and scientific authors reported a calamitous event on July 2, 1840, when a landslide triggered by a volcanic eruption and/or an earthquake obliterated several villages loca...

Assessment of the future water resources in the Italian Alps under climate change is required, but the hydrological cycle of the high-altitude catchments therein is poorly studied and little understood. Hydrological monitoring and modeling in the Alps is difficult, given the lack of first hand, site specific data. Here, we present a method to model...

The application of Structure-from-Motion (SfM) Photogrammetry with ground-based and UAV camera stations may be exploited for modelling the topographic surface of Alpine glaciers. Multi-temporal repeated surveys lead to geometric models that may be applied to analyze the glacier retreat under global warming conditions. Thanks to the integration of p...

This study presents a map reporting valuable information on the cryosphere of the Central Karakoram National Park (CKNP, the largest protected area of Pakistan and the highest park in the world). All the information is provided considering the CKNP as a whole, and in detail by dividing it into five basins (i.e. Shigar, Hunza, Shyok, Upper Indus, an...

Snow can be considered an independent ecosystem that hosts active microbial communities. Snow microbial communities have been extensively investigated in the Arctic and in the Antarctica, but rarely in mid-latitude mountain areas. In this study, we investigated the bacterial communities of snow collected in four glacierized areas (Alps, Eastern Ana...

1. INTRODUZIONE La presente memoria, costituisce una rassegna dei risultati salienti del progetto IDROSTELVIO Un network i-drometrico per il Parco dello Stelvio Lombardo allo stato attuale. Il progetto, avviato nel 2010 e giunto ora all'ot-tavo anno di attività, nasce da una collaborazione tra il Consorzio del Parco Nazionale dello Stelvio, l'Unive...

Cryoconite holes are small depressions of the glacier surface filled with melting water and with a wind-blown debris on the bottom. These environments are considered hot spots of biodiversity and biological activities on glaciers and host communities dominated by bacteria. Most of the studies on cryoconite holes assume that their communities are st...

Glaciers are important fresh-water reservoirs for our planet. Although they are often located at high elevations or in remote areas, glacial ecosystems are not pristine, as many pollutants can undergo long-range atmospheric transport and be deposited on glacier surface, where they can be stored for long periods of time, and then be released into th...

We used the Poly-Hydro model to assess the main hydrological components of the snow-ice melt driven Maipo River in Chile, and glaciers’ retreat under climate change therein until 2100. We used field data of ice ablation, ice thickness, weather and hydrological data, and precipitation from TRMM. Snow cover and temperature were taken from MODIS. We f...

Structure-from-Motion (SfM) photogrammetry is a flexible and powerful tool to provide 3D point clouds describing the surface of objects. Due to the easy transportability and low-cost of necessary equipment with respect to laser scanning techniques, SfM photogrammetry has great potential to be applied in harsh high-mountain environment. Here point c...

We present and compare 11 years of snow data (snow depth and snow water equivalent, SWE) measured by an automatic weather station (AWS) and corroborated by data from field campaigns on the Forni Glacier in Italy. The aim of the analysis is to estimate the SWE of new snowfall and the annual SWE peak based on the average density of the new snow at th...

La dinamica del Ghiacciaio dei Forni, il più grande ghiacciaio vallivo italiano situato all'interno del Parco Nazionale dello Stelvio (Gruppo Ortles-Cevedale, Alta Valtellina), è stata simulata attraverso un modello di flusso monodimensionale tempo dipendente, che descrive le variazioni di spessore del ghiaccio lungo la linea di flusso centrale. Il...

Tourists and hikers visiting glaciers all year round face hazards such as sudden terminus collapses, typical of such a dynamically evolving environment. In this study, we analyzed the potential of different survey techniques to analyze hazards of the Forni Glacier, an important geosite located in Stelvio Park (Italian Alps). We carried out surveys...

Mountain environments are extremely influenced by climate change but are also often affected by the lack of long and high-quality meteorological data, especially in glaciated areas, which limits the ability to investigate the acting processes at local scale. For this reason, we checked a method to reconstruct high-resolution spatial distribution an...

The application of Structure-from-Motion photogrammetry with ground-based and UAV-based camera stations can be effectively exploited for modeling the topographic surface of Alpine glaciers. Multi-temporal repeated surveys may lead to geometric models that may be applied to analyze the glacier retreat under global warming conditions. Here the case s...

We computed and analysed the geometry changes affecting an Italian glacierized sector (the Sondrio Province, Adda River Basin). This zone was chosen because i) there is a relative abundance of high resolution remote sensing data covering the last thirty years, ii) it represents an important sector of the glacierized areas of Italy, and iii) it is f...

Over the last decades, the expansion of supraglacial debris on worldwide mountain glaciers has been reported. Nevertheless, works dealing with the detection and mapping of supraglacial debris and detailed analyses aimed at identifying the temporal and spatial trends affecting glacier debris cover are still limited. In this study, we used different...

In contrast to the central and eastern part of High Mountain Asia (HMA), no extensive glacier mass loss has been observed in the Karakoram during previous decades. However, the potential meteorological and glaciological causes of the so-called Karakoram Anomaly are diverse and still under debate. This paper introduces and presents a novel glacier S...

This paper presents a geomorphological map of Mount Ararat/Agri Dagi in Eastern Anatolia (Turkey). Mount Ararat/Agri Dagi is a volcanic complex covered by a unique ice cap in the Near East. The massif is the result of multiple volcanic phases, and present day landforms are the result of subsequent and overlapping glacial, periglacial, and slope pro...

Structural glaciology yields important details about the evolution of glacier dynamics in response to climate change. The maps provided here document the occurrence and evolution of brittle and ductile structures on the tongue of Forni Glacier, Ortles-Cevedale Group, Central Italian Alps, between 2003 and 2014. Through the remote sensing-based anal...

Experts from the University of Milan have been investigating Forni Glacier in the Italian alps for decades, resulting in the archive of a cumbersome mass of observed data. While the analysis of archive maps, medium resolution satellite images and DEM’s may provide an overview of the long-term processes, the application of close-range sensing techni...

Superstripes press science series

Debris-covered glaciers are glaciers with the largest part of the ablation zone covered by a debris layer. Recent papers showed that debris-covered glaciers are able to support plant and arthropod life, advancing the hypothesis that such landforms could act as warm-stage refugia for cold-adapted species due to their microclimate features and therma...