
Melissa LatellaCentro Euro-Mediterraneo sui Cambiamenti Climatici | CMCC · Impacts on Agriculture, Forests and Ecosystem Services division
Melissa Latella
Doctor of Philosophy
Investigating how water, vegetation and sediments interact across rivers, watersheds and coastal environments
About
20
Publications
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Introduction
Additional affiliations
November 2018 - present
Education
January 2017 - February 2019
October 2016 - October 2018
October 2016 - October 2018
Publications
Publications (20)
The residual woods of the western Po Valley are today localised in a few specific areas: in ancient Savoy hunting reserves in Piedmont (today almost all of which have become Regional Parks), in some collective properties of ancient origin or along several river corridors. Most of them are located in Natura 2000 areas. In sites that are still freque...
The classification of ultra-high-resolution (UHR) imagery, characterized by spatial resolutions exceeding 10 cm, presents opportunities and challenges distinct from lower-resolution counterparts. Particularly, challenges are pronounced in some scenarios, such as mapping plant species in coastal environments, where similar vegetation responses and s...
In recent decades, fluvial geomorphology and ecohydraulic research have extensively used field observations, remote sensing or hydrodynamic modelling to understand river systems. This study presents an innovative approach that combines field surveys , Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR)-based topographical and biomass analyses and model-derived hyd...
The role of vegetation in supporting life on Earth is widely known. Nevertheless, the relevance of riparian corridors has been overlooked for a long time, leading to a dramatic reduction of vegetated buffers alongside them. Vegetation monitoring systems, including those for biomass estimation, are required to manage riparian corridors properly. Fie...
Riparian zones are the paragon of transitional ecosystems, providing critical habitat and ecosystem services that are especially threatened by global change. Following consultation with experts, 10 key challenges were identified to be addressed for riparian vegetation science and management improvement: (1) Create a distinct scientific community by...
In non-arid environments, the evolution of rivers and floodplains is an eco-morphodynamic process conditioned by riparian vegetation dynamics and continuous feedback among plants, water, and sediments. Because of these mutual interactions, proper quantification of vegetation geometry and biomass in riparian corridors is needed to carry out realisti...
European watersheds have been subjected to different anthropic disturbances affecting their sediment budget and the morphodynamic asset in the last century, such as extensive mining, flow regulation, damming, land-use change, and embankment. As a response, gravel-bed rivers went through planform shifts, typically from multi-to single-thread configu...
In recent years, numerous directives worldwide have addressed the conservation and restoration of riparian corridors, activities that rely on continuous vegetation mapping to understand its volumetric features and health status. Mapping riparian corridors requires not only fine‐scale resolution but also the coverage of relatively large areas. The u...
In recent years, satellite imagery has shown its potential to support the sustainable management of land, water, and natural resources. In particular, it can provide key information about the properties and behavior of sandy beaches and the surrounding vegetation, improving the ecomorphological understanding and modeling of coastal dynamics. Althou...
We propose a methodology to calibrate a stochastic model for riparian vegetation dynamics that is based on real data. The methodology integrates various tools that are often used individually in fluvial investigations and it is here applied to the case of the Cinca river (Spain), aiming to explore how its riparian vegetation responds to changing cl...
The relevance and fragility of coastal dune systems are widely recognized. Various conceptual and numerical models have been formulated so far to cope with the threats that affect coastal systems worldwide. These models acknowledge the fundamental influence of vegetation in controlling coastal dunes stability but usually disregard some of the facto...
Nowadays, LiDAR is widely used for individual tree detection, usually providing higher accuracy in coniferous stands than in deciduous ones, where the rounded-crown, the presence of understory vegetation, and the random spatial tree distribution may affect the identification algorithms. In this work, we propose a novel algorithm that aims to overco...
Abstract Riparian environments are highly dynamic ecosystems that support biodiversity and numerous services and that are conditioned by anthropogenic activities and climate change. In this work, we propose an integrated methodology that combines different research approaches—field studies and numerical and analytical modeling—in order to calibrate...
The distribution of phreatophyte riparian vegetation can be described by a stochastic model for vegetation growth. According to this, vegetation dynamics are influenced by the topography of the riparian transect and the randomness of hydrological fluctuations, acting as a dichotomous Markov noise. Also, the response of vegetation to this forcing, i...