Paolo Billi

University of Ferrara | UNIFE · Department of Physics and Earth Sciences

Purpose Particle size distribution (PSD) assessment, which affects all physical, chemical, biological, mineralogical, and geological properties of soil, is crucial for maintaining soil sustainability. It plays a vital role in ensuring appropriate land use, fertilizer management, crop selection, and conservation practices, especially in fragile soil...

This study explores and compares the predictive capabilities of various ensemble algorithms, including SVM, KNN, RF, XGBoost, ANN, DT, and LR, for assessing flood susceptibility (FS) in the Houz plain of the Moroccan High Atlas. The inventory map of past flooding was prepared using binary data from 2012 events, where “1” indicates a flood-prone are...

Land degradation is caused by multiple forces, including extreme weather conditions, particularly drought and floods. It is also caused by human activities that pollute or degrade the quality of soils and land utility. It negatively affects food production and ecosystem goods and services. Land degradation has accelerated during the 20th and 21st c...

The article aims at presenting the results of the analysis of changes in the public discourse reporting about floods by media and their attitude towards natural disasters. The authors used the methods of critical and semantic-pragmatic and statistical quantitative and qualitative analysis, as well as the analysis of lexical cohesion and the use of...

The purpose of this review is to present the changes in the forest landscape in Eritrea over a period of approximately 120 years. Data on Eritrean forest resources with their status, distribution and challenges were gathered and compiled after assessing all available published documents pertinent to forests in Eritrea. The review has identified tha...

The Juba and Wabe Shabelle are the largest permanent rivers of Somalia and of the whole Horn of Africa. Though these rivers have neighboring catchments of almost the same size, their hydrology and channel dynamics are rather different. Such differences are investigated in the modern rivers, and a comparison with old (Quaternary?) avulsion channels...

Eritrea, Djibouti and Somalia have peculiar physiographic characteristics and, though their climate is mainly controlled by the north–south–north movement of the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), the large difference in elevation (3000 m from sea level to the highest peak) and the variable distance from the ocean also play an important role, a...

The landscape of Eritrea is highly variable and reflects the complex geological history of the area, which is only partially shared with the other regions of the Horn of Africa. The structural geomorphology of Eritrea was investigated through field surveys, literature reviews and a few topographic profiles oriented east–west across the country. The...

The Dabaan is a Middle Eocene to Early Miocene sedimentary basin. It stretches from the plateau margin to the Gulf of Aden and is drained by two main ephemeral streams: the Byoguure and the Kalajab. The climate ranges from semiarid in the headwaters to hyper-arid in the middle and lower reaches. Both rivers have an ephemeral flow regime as they are...

Eritrea is a mountainous country. Its physiography and landscape are the results of uninterrupted uplift and faulting in the Cenozoic. Both the highlands and the rift escarpment are characterised by a high relief ratio, the occurrence of deeply incised rivers systems and rugged geomorphology. Rivers in the headwaters are incised into bedrock or may...

The Samoti plain is a structural basin and it is located in the northern part of the Danakil depression. The environment is that typical of a hot and dry desert. The landscape has been shaped by the recent tectonic activity and by hydromorphological and aeolian processes. The rivers are ephemeral and have a dry bed for the most of the time. Data on...

Grazing is a major cause of soil erosion and land degradation across many parts of Ethiopia. This study examined the effects of exclosure on subsurface water levels, soil erosion, and the relationship between daily rainfall and subsurface water levels. Piezometers were used to measure subsurface water levels in the exclosure area during 2017–2020....

Land-use changes extensively impacting soil erosion processes. The WIntErO model was used to evaluate the effect of land-use changes on soil erosion intensity in the Mountainous Watersheds of North Montenegro, by comparing the impact of different land uses with similar Geography, Elevations, Geology, Soils, Water Permeability and Meteorological cha...

https://www.ethiopia-insight.com/2022/03/18/ethiopias-nile-dam-was-meles-endeavor-not-haile-selassies/ There have been efforts recently to politicize who gets credit for planning GERD. The current official narrative in Ethiopia tends to downplay the role of former Prime Minister Meles Zenawi in conceiving of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (G...

The knowledge about river sediment yield in Italy is rather scarce and mainly based on small reservoir sedimentation data. This study used the suspended sediment yield field data measured by the national and regional hydrological services. The data of nine rivers and 11 selected flow gauges were used to investigate the control of basic parameters s...

Study Region The coast of the Emilia-Romagna Region in northern Italy consists of about 210 km of sandy beaches that have been attracting tourists for decades. Since the 1980s, erosion processes resulted in a remarkable beach retreat, notwithstanding the construction of several protections works. Study Focus In 2005–2006 and 2017–2020, 30 floods o...

We present factual errors, methodological flaws, wrong assumptions, inadequate data use, misleading conclusions and scientific misconducts committed by a book chapter by Dandrawy and Omran (2020) on the GERD, titled “Integrated Watershed Management of Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam via Watershed Modeling System and Remote Sensing” in environmental...

Even though flooding is a threat to rural communities in plains drained by ephemeral rivers, the magnitude of its impact, coping/prevention mechanisms, and the implications for river management are not well known. In this study, data were collected using a phenomenological‐based research design. Field observations, a questionnaire (n = 440), key in...

The cover image is based on the Original Article Effect of subsurface water level on gully headcut retreat in tropical highlands of Ethiopia by Mesenbet Sebhat et al., https://doi.org/10.1002/esp.5095.

Land use change is known as one of the main influencing factors on soil erosion and sediment production processes. The objective of the article is to study on how land use change impacts on soil erosion by using Intensity of Erosion and Outflow (IntErO) as a process-oriented soil erosion model. The study has been conducted under land use changes wi...

Gully erosion is a major cause of soil loss and severe land degradation in sub‐humid Ethiopia. The objective of this study was to investigate the role and the effect of subsurface water level change on gully headcut retreat, gully formation and expansion in high rainfall tropical regions in the Ethiopian highlands. During the rainy seasons of 2017–...

Across the world, on-site and off-site effects of soil erosion accelerated by anthropogenic land-use/cover changes have been partly offset by the implementation of soil and water conservation (SWC) measures. However, studies evaluating the effectiveness of SWC over longer periods are currently rare. The dimensions of the terraced fields and SWC wer...

Land use change in all river basins leads to changes in hydrologic response, soil erosion, and sediment dynamics characteristics. Those changes are often viewed as the main cause of accelerated erosion rates. We studied the impact of land use changes on soil erosion processes in one of the watersheds in Montenegro: the Miocki Potok, using this wate...

We present factual errors, methodological flaws, wrong assumptions, inadequate data use, misleading conclusions and scientific misconducts committed by a book chapter by Dandrawy and Omran (2020) on the GERD, titled "Integrated Watershed Management of Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam via Watershed Modeling System and Remote Sensing" In Environmental...

We present factual errors, methodological flaws, wrong assumptions, inadequate data use, misleading conclusions and scientific misconducts committed by a book chapter by Dandrawy and Omran (2020) on the GERD, titled “Integrated Watershed Management of Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam via Watershed Modeling System and Remote Sensing” In Environmental...

Water erosion is one of the main degradation processes of tropical soils. In steepest areas with coffee cultivation, the erosion rates are intensified and could reach levels above the Soil Loss Tolerance Limits (T). Thus, the objective of this work was to evaluate the susceptibility to water erosion in steepest areas under predominant coffee cultiv...

Over the last decades, most of the Emilia-Romagna (Italy) beaches have been affected by marked erosion that is still progressing, which is primarily due to the reduction of sediment supply by the local rivers. In addition to larger fluvial systems, the role of small rivers has been recognized as important in contributing to both beach stability and...

The magnitudes of flash floods and their effect on channel width changes were investigated for Hara river in the Raya graben (northern Ethiopia). Precipitation was measured using rain gauges evenly distributed over the study catchment. Event peak discharges were measured with crest‐stage gauges at a reference cross‐section. Changes in channel width...

One of the most relevant features of alluvial rivers concerns flow resistance, which depends on many factors including, mainly grain resistance and form drag. For natural sand-bed rivers, dunes furnish the most significant contribution and this paper provides an insight on it. To achieve this aim, momentum balance equations and energy balance equat...

Little is known about the contribution of bedload flux to the total sediment load exported from tropical sand-bed rivers. Yet, predicting bedload transport rates contributes to better river management, more appropriate river engineering works design, accurate knowledge of sediment delivery rates, which greatly benefits sediment related water resour...

Gully erosion is an important sediment source and causes severe environmental degradation, particularly in the drought-prone regions of Ethiopia. We investigated the morphological characteristics of gullies, the topographic thresholds of gully formation, and estimated headcut retreat rates in three agro-ecologies of the Upper Blue Nile basin, Ethio...

Gully erosion is one of the main causes of land degradation, particularly in the drought-prone regions of Ethiopia. This study assessed spatio-temporal changes of gully length and density in watershed pairs in Guder, Aba Gerima, and Dibatie sites, which are representative highland, midland, and lowland agro-ecologies in the Upper Blue Nile basin of...

In this chapter, we present an overview of historical aerial photographs and maps of Ethiopia, illustrating it with examples from Dogu’a Tembien. Availability and quality of currently existing maps are also discussed, as well as the use of landscape photographs for analysis of environmental changes.

This paper investigates land-use/cover changes related to river dynamics in northern Ethiopia. Aerial photographs from 1965 to 1986, and SPOT images of 2007 and 2014 were used to extract land units. Land-use/cover changes took place in 48% of the entire landscape around the river across the last five decades. Changes related to swap accounted for 3...

Calculation of Soil erosion intensity and Runoff in the S7-8-int basin of the Shirindareh Watershed in Iran

The geomorphology, hydrology and processes of ephemeral streams are poorly known and studies on the geomorphic characteristics of ephemeral meandering streams (EMS) are even less investigated. We collected geomorphic data (namely, channel width, sinuosity, wavelength and curvature radius) from 107 EMS reaches in different drylands of the world from...

This study investigates the occurrence of droughts in the Dire Dawa area of eastern Ethiopia. A new index based on the rainfall delay (Rd) with respect to the expected onset (and traditional) seeding time and other indices, i.e., the aridity index and the Z-score, alternatives to the Standard Precipitation Index (SPI), are used to test the validity...

From the 1950s, the Po delta, one of the largest anthropogenic world deltas, has been subjected to a fast degradation and shoreline retreat due a marked reduction of sediment supply, mainly controlled by human impacts/factors, including subsidence. Through the interpretation of satellite images, coupled with the analysis of the flow discharge, and...

Soil erosion is a growing problem within the Mountainous region of North Montenegro and Southwest Serbia being a very serious threat to soil quality of the agricultural land. We used IntErO model for the assessment of sediment yield and runoff in the Sekularska Rijeka river basin from the Northeast Montenegro. The studied area is characterized by t...

The Fiumi Uniti and Savio rivers are two small sandy-bed river systems which sediment yield contributes feeds part of the Emilia-Romagna beaches (Italy). Since the twentieth century the northern Adriatic coast has been affected by well-known beach retreat phenomena. As the sediment supply of these local rivers is not well known, an analysis of bed-...

Land Degradation caused by soil erosion is complex phenomenon, generated from interactions of physical, biological and chemical processes. Biogeochemical reactions, transforming rock to soil, are frequently influenced by the physical processes, and water is one of the main causative agents of crushing of rocks and of the formation of fractures. Fur...

SUMMARY This research presents recently introduced approach by authors of the Ecological-Economic (Eco-Eco) modelling using the Intensity of Erosion and Outflow (IntErO) model for the assessment of soil erosion intensity and the impacts of different land covers on sediment yield. The Eco-Eco modelling approach has been applied in one of the sub-ba...

This research presents recently introduced approach by authors of the Ecological-Economic (Eco-Eco) modelling using the Intensity of Erosion and Outflow (IntErO) model for the assessment of soil erosion intensity and the impacts of different land covers on sediment yield. The Eco-Eco modelling approach has been applied in one of the sub-basins of t...

A two years field campaign of bedload transport measurements was carried out on the Fiumi Uniti R. a few kilometres upstream of its outlet into the Adriatic Sea in order to investigate the role of river sediment supply to a beach that has been experiencing severe degradation throughout the last decades. The threshold condition for bedload entrainme...

This paper presents an Ecological-Economic (Eco-Eco) modelling using the Intensity of Erosion and Outflow (IntErO) model for calculation of sediment yield and runoff assessing the impacts of different land covers on soil erosion intensity. Calculations have been made for the Velicka River basin, which is one of 57 sub-basins of the Lim River in the...

Land Degradation caused by soil erosion is complex phenomenon, generated from interactions of physical, biological and chemical processes. Biogeochemical reactions, transforming rock to soil, are frequently influenced by the physical processes, and water is one of the main causative agents of crushing of rocks and of the formation of fractures. Fur...

The hydrological data of 23 flow gauges, evenly distributed across the Italian territory and covering almost 40% of it, have been analyzed in order to verify the occurrence of temporal trends and their rates of change. A total of 102 time series diagrams of the parameters considered, i.e. precipitation, runoff, maximum discharge, discharge exceed 1...

This study investigates the temporal variability and effects of bio-climatic factors and bridges on local hydro-geomorphic conditions that cause excess sedimentation and flood hazard in ephemeral rivers of the Raya graben (northern Ethiopia). Normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) was analyzed using Landsat imageries of 1972, 1986, 2000, 200...

The aerial photographs (APs) acquired by the Istituto Geografico Militare (IGM) in the period of the Italian occupation of Ethiopia (1935-1941) have recently been discovered, scanned and organised. Until recently, the oldest APs of the country that were available had been taken in the period 1958-1964. The APs over Ethiopia in 1935-1941 consist of...

Several papers have been published on different issues regarding the climate of Ethiopia or of some specific region. This presentation attempts to revise the knowledge of the climate of Ethiopia by means of updated, longer time series and including a larger number of meteo-stations than previous studies. Basic climatic parameters such as temperatur...

We present a preliminary note on the carbon and nitrogen elemental and isotopic composition of the suspended load of the Po River, i.e., of the more important river of Italy, sampled in distinct hydrological periods. This paper explains thoroughly the sampling and the employed EA-IRMS analytical method. The results are discussed to (a) discriminate...

Within upstream reaches of incised valleys, fluvial sedimentation occurs where it is controlled by interaction between climate and tectonics. This study focuses on a Plio-Pleistocene fluvial paleovalley, which drained the northeastern margin of Siena basin (northern Apennines, Italy). Valley filling resulted from the interaction between river drain...

Aksum is one of the most important archaeological and historical towns in Ethiopia. The archaeological area stretches on a plateau ranging from 2,250 to 2,460 m, and the general landscape consists of a few dome-shaped hills standing on a plateau crossed by small ephemeral streams. The main geomorphic features are the result of the emplacement of ba...

The structural basin of Kobo (northern Ethiopia) is characterised by a semi-arid, monsoon-affected climate, and it is drained by ephemeral streams. The basin is physiographycally asymmetric with the highest mountains along the western margin where the largest rivers originate. The river morphology well matches the ideal model proposed by Schumm (Th...

This introductory chapter reports about the main geographic and geomorphologic features of Ethiopia. The prevailing soil types are described and soil erosion data are reported and analyzed. A brief description of the natural vegetation is provided as well. The country’s main geomorphological landscapes regions are identified as follows: (1) the nor...

The scientific literature about the geomorphology and hydrology of Ethiopian rivers is very poor, though large and socially important rivers have their source in this country. The largest rivers deliver their waters into the Mediterranean Sea or the Indian Ocean, whereas the most of the smaller ones have an endorheic drainage. Flow data were collec...

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, Ethiopia has been subjected to an increased frequency of flash floods, especially in the town of Dire Dawa. The results of international organizations studies point to no evidence of a climate-driven change in the magnitude/frequency of floods, though increases in runoff and risk of floods in East Af...

The negative impact of sediments on the environment and water resources is widely acknowledged with many watercourses in Montenegro and in the South Eastern European Region. To reduce sediment exports from the big river basins discharging to the accumulations, it is essential to identify the sources: critical sub basins and the quantity of its sedi...

The negative impact of sediments on the environment and water resources is widely acknowledged with many watercourses in Montenegro and in the South Eastern European Region. To reduce sediment exports from the big river basins discharging to the accumulations, it is essential to identify the sources: critical sub basins and the quantity of its sedi...

Main objective of this paper is to compare the field data measured on a few step-pool reaches of the Aneva River in the Northern Apennines with a reference database including a large number of fields and laboratory data derived from the wide literature on step-pool streams in order to contribute to describe their geomorphology and to understand the...

To study the magnitude of land degradation, desertification or resilience in Montenegro throughout the 20th and early-21st centuries, we rephoto-graphed the landscapes recorded on 48 historical photographs dating back to between 1890 and 1985, and analysed in a semi-quantitative way the land use and cover changes that had occurred using an expert r...

With the recovery of the European beaver (Castor fiber) and their capacity to engineer fluvial landscapes, questions arise as to how they influence sediment transport, including the spatio-temporal trends and patterns of sedimentation in beaver ponds. The Chevral river (Ardennes, Belgium) contains two beaver dam sequences, which appeared in 2004. V...

Sedimentological and architectural data from three-dimensional larger vertical outcrops of Pleistocene fluvial deposits of the Dandiero Basin (Eritrean Danakil depression) are here used to reconstruct planform evolution of a meander bend and investigate the role of overbank flooding in sediment distribution on point bars. The point bar accumulated...

Soil erosion is a growing problem in South East Europe and is creating a hazard to soil quality, environment and biodiversity. It is well-known fact that runoff, soil erosion and as consequence sedimentation, are decreasing a reservoirs capacity and that is noticeable in the region of Polimlje, where the studied watershed belongs. This is causing t...

A first aim of this paper is to investigate the existence, if any, and the parameters defining the occurrence conditions of a continuum of rhythmic, transverse roughness elements of gravel-bed rivers such as transverse ribs, step-pools and riffle and pool sequences. The investigation is carried out by the analysis of a large data set consisting of...

The present study deals with the fault-sourced, alluvial-fan deposits of the Plio-Pleistocene Upper Valdarno Basin (Northern Apennines, Italy). Different phases of alluvial fan aggradation, progradation and backstep are discussed as possible effects of the interaction among fault-generated accommodation space, sediment supply and discharge variatio...

With the recovery of the European beaver (Castor fiber) and their capacity to engineer fluvial landscapes, questions arise as to how they influence river discharge and sediment transport. The Chevral river (Ardennes, Belgium) contains two beaver dam sequences which appeared in 2004 and count now about 30 dams. Flow discharges and sediment fluxes we...

In the last decade the frequency of flash floods has markedly increased all over Ethiopia. They have caused a number of fatalities and a large amount of property damage. The occurrence of such flash floods is recorded mainly in semi-arid areas with the monsoon-like rain distribution typical of Ethiopia and an annual rainfall around 500-700 mm. In o...