Stefano Della Chiesa

Leibniz Institute of Ecological Urban and Regional Development | IOER · Research Infrastructure and Management

Most research activities in Earth System Sciences (ESS) are data-driven. There is a growing need to establish innovative, cross-cutting data management and data analysis methods in ESS to support the collaboration of interdisciplinary research building on heterogeneous sources. Data management plans (DMPs) are structured documents that outline data...

Research in global change ecology relies heavily on global climatic grids derived from estimates of air temperature in open areas at around 2 m above the ground. These climatic grids do not reflect conditions below vegetation canopies and near the ground surface, where critical ecosystem functions occur and most terrestrial species reside. Here, we...

Intensive agricultural management significantly affects soil chemical properties. Such impacts, depending on the intensity of agronomic practices, might persist for several decades. We tested how current soil properties, especially heavy metal concentrations, reflect the land-use history over a 24,000 ha area dominated by intensive apple orchards a...

The Alpine Convention (AC) promotes research, cooperation and monitoring activities in the Alpine Region. In this framework, the AC Atlas is the official content management system for geographical data published by the Alpine Convention. The AC Atlas' final goal is to promote, collect, organise and disseminate the results of research activities car...

Easily accessible data is an essential requirement for scientific data analysis. The Data Browser Matsch | Mazia was designed to provide a fast and comprehensible solution to access, visualize and download the microclimatic measurements of the IT 25 LT(S)ER Match | Mazia research site in South Tyrol, Northern Italy, with the overall aim to provide...

Research in environmental science relies heavily on global climatic grids derived from estimates of air temperature at around 2 meter above ground1-3. These climatic grids however fail to reflect conditions near and below the soil surface, where critical ecosystem functions such as soil carbon storage are controlled and most biodiversity resides4-8...

In Agriculture, sustainable use of soil and water resources are a present-day challenge and require detailed knowledge of soil biophysical properties and water needs. Irrigation practices and soil management are more and more critically discussed due to ongoing climatic changes and rising public sensitivity toward sustainable usage of soil and wate...

Agricultural crop production relies on soil properties and is often hampered due to excessive concentrations of heavy metals such as copper (Cu). Indeed, the intensive use of Cu-containing agrochemicals has led to the accumulation of this metal in soils, particularly in vineyards and orchards. Toxic Cu concentrations might lead to synergisms and an...

Accurate fertilization management is a present-day challenge and can conciliate profitability and sustainability in agriculture production. This study presents topsoil concentrations of P2O5 and K2O in apple orchards and vineyards in South Tyrol, Italy. Sixteen thousand georeferenced soil samples were collected and spatialized using ordinary local...

Meteo Browser South Tyrol is a user-friendly web-based application that helps to visualize and download the hydro-meteorological time series freely available in South Tyrol, Italy. It is designed for a wide range of users, from common citizens to students as well as researchers, private companies and the public administration. Meteo Browser South T...

Detailed knowledge of agricultural soil properties is a key element for high-quality food production. However, high-resolution soil data covering a large agricultural region are generally unavailable. This study explores a demand-driven cooperative framework for soil data sourcing that connects individual farmers to several stakeholders by means of...

In agriculture, detailed knowledge of soil properties is a key element for high-quality food production. However, soil data at a single parcel scale are generally unavailable. In this study, a best practice framework is presented where, through an operational chain from an individual farmer through a centralised database and with a geostatistical a...

Manipulative approaches under natural conditions are fundamental for understanding impacts of climate warming on grassland (agro-) ecosystems. In this paper we present 3 years of data from two simultaneously conducted transplantation experiments, where meadow monoliths were transplanted downwards along an elevation gradient from the subalpine to th...

Measuring winter solid and liquid precipitation with high temporal resolution in remote or higher elevation regions is a challenging task because of undercatch and power supply issues. However, the number of micro-meteorological stations and ultrasonic height sensors in mountain regions is steadily increasing. To gain more benefit from such station...

Global change phenomena as land use change and temperature increase are well proved to have significant impacts on biodiversity, water budget and ecosystem functioning of mountain regions. However, many studies act as isolated investigations within a complex, multidimensional space and are thus limited in their significance. Hence, it is rather ess...

This paper presents an approach for retrieval of soil moisture content (SMC) from different satellite sensors with a focus on mountain areas. The novelties of the paper are: the extension of an already developed method to coarse resolution data (150 m) in mountain environment with high land heterogeneity, with only VV polarization and the proper se...

The effects of elevation on surface water fluxes in dry alpine grassland ecosystems were investigated along an elevational transect between 1000 and 2000 m above sea level established in the Vinschgau/Venosta valley, a relatively dry region in the Italian Alps. The GEOtop-dv hydrological model was employed in point-scale mode to model the effects o...

This paper presents the results of a two-year experiment carried out in mountain areas on soil moisture retrieval from remotely sensed images. In particular, fully polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (SAR) RADARSAT and single polarization ASAR images were used. During acquisitions of SAR over the test area in Alto Adige, Südtirol region, northern...

The Upper Etsch basin is one of the driest valleys of the Alps. For effective mitigation strategies it is essential to understand where climate change (CC) will likely have the most severe impacts in terms of water availability. In the HydroAlp project the impacts of CC on the hydrological cycle of the Upper Etsch basin have been analysed, with ref...

In this work we address the synergy of optical, SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) and topographic data in soil moisture retrieval over an Alpine area. As estimation technique, we consider Gaussian Process Regression (GPR). The test area is located in South Tyrol, Italy where the main land types are meadows and pastures. Time series of ASAR Wide Swath...

The goal of this study was to assess the applicability of medium resolution SAR time-series, in combination with in-situ point measurements and machine learning, for the estimation of soil moisture content (SMC). One of the main challenges was the combination of SMC point measurements and satellite data. Due to the high spatial variability of soil...

This paper analyzes the spatial patterns of surface soil moisture of alpine meadows and pastures in the Matsch/Mazia Valley in the Italian Alps by comparing estimations from three different sources of information: (I) RADARSAT 2 synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images; (II) simulations by using the GEOtop hydrological model and (III) ground observati...

In mountain areas, soil moisture is a key parameter for both agricultural management and natural hazard support. This paper presents an approach for retrieval of soil moisture content (SMC) from different satellite sensors with a specific focus on mountain areas. The experimental analysis was carried out on images acquired over the Südtirol/Alto Ad...

A climate change impact study on spatial pattern of evaporation and soil moisture was performed in the Venosta/Vinschgau valley (South Tyrol, Italy). Locating hot spots of future changes for these main components of the water cycle is essential for the development of mitigation and adaptation strategies in this dry inner alpine valley, which is alr...

Accurate information about soil moisture content (SMC) in mountain catchments is of great importance in hydrological applications, agriculture and climate change impact analysis. In the last two decades microwave remote sensing sensors such as Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) have been deeply exploited for surface SMC estimation. However, obtaining r...

Measuring precipitation in mountain areas is a demanding task, but essential for hydrological and environmental themes. Especially in small Alpine catchments with short hydrological response, precipitation data with high temporal resolution are required for a better understanding of the hydrological cycle. Since most climate/meteorological stations...

A comparison among multi-source data with the main aim to detect soil moisture dynamics in an Alpine catchment is presented. The data sources are: ground measurements derived from field campaigns and meteorological stations, simulations from a hydrological model and estimates derived from SAR images. The test site is located in the north-western pa...

In mountain regions soil-plant-atmosphere processes exhibit rapid changes within short distance due to the complex pattern of topography and atmospheric processes. An elevation transect can be seen as a proxy of climate change (CC), as it affects air temperature, precipitation amount and its partitioning into snow and rain, snow cover duration, and...

Soil moisture is a key factor for numerous processes, including runoff generation, groundwater recharge, evapotranspiration, soil respiration, and biological productivity. Understanding the controls on the spatial and temporal variability of soil moisture in mountain catchments is an essential step towards improving quantitative predictions of catc...

Different manipulative approaches have been developed to study and quantify impacts of temperature increase on grassland ecosystems. Many of them share the problem of unwanted effects on the surrounding microclimatic conditions. Transplantation of grassland mesocosms along elevation gradients can be a realistic alternative, although with some restr...

Accurate quantification of precipitation is still one of the major sources of uncertainty in quantifying the water budget of Alpine catchments. In fact, besides increasing data availability, usually most of the stations are located in the bottom of the valleys, while, at high elevations, rain gauge accuracy is limited by snow and wind, with strong...

a b s t r a c t The semi-natural landscapes of Mediterranean mountains underwent a remarkable land abandonment in the past decades. These large perturbation-dependent landscapes then evolved into new meta-stable states to balance human pressures and natural components with a general pattern homogenisation and several consequences on landscape servi...

In this work, the polarimetric capability of RADARSAT-2 images is exploited in the aim of soil moisture content retrieval in Alpine meadows and pastures. Three feature extraction methods are investigated: the simple polarimetric intensity and phase processing, the H/A/α polarimetric decomposition, and the Independent Component Analysis (ICA). The f...

Soil moisture retrieval is one of the most challenging problems in the context of biophysical parameter estimation from remotely sensed data. Typically, microwave signals are used thanks to their sensitivity to variations in the water content of soil. However, especially in the Alps, the presence of vegetation and the heterogeneity of topography ma...

In mountain areas, land surface temperature (LST) is a key parameter in the surface energy budget and is controlled by a complex interplay of topography, incoming radiation and atmospheric processes, as well as soil moisture distribution, different land covers and vegetation types. In this contribution, the LST spatial distribution of the Stubai Va...

Snow extent and relative physical properties are key parameters in hydrology, weather forecast and hazard warning as well as in climatological models. Satellite sensors offer a unique advantage in monitoring snow cover due to their temporal and spatial synoptic view. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MODIS) from NASA is especially usefu...

Regional climate scenarios predict a temperature increase and a summer precipitation decrease for the European Alps. This is expected to lead to longer vegetation periods, but also to drought stress in Alpine meadows ecosystems. It is therefore uncertain if the predicted climatic changes will lead to an increase or decrease of biomass production in...

Land Surface Temperature (LST) is a key boundary condition in many land surface schemes and its estimation is crucial for a correct quantification of the surface energy fluxes and, through evapotranspiration, of the water budget. In mountain areas, the modeling of LST is particularly challenging because of the complex interplay of topography, incom...

The human actions and the human-linked land use changes are the main responsible of the present landscapes and vegetation patterns (Antrop, 2005; Pelorosso et al., 2009). Hence, revised concept of potential natural vegetation has been developed in landscape ecology. In fact, it cannot more be considered as the optimum for a certain landscape, but o...

The project Climate Change in South Tyrol aims to study the effects of climate change (CC) on the water balance and the consequences for the vegetation in a dry Alpine region, using an innovative multidisciplinary approach that combines modelling and experimentation. Regional climate scenarios predict a temperature increase and a summer precipitati...

In mountain areas, accurate modeling of the surface energy and water budgets is needed to predict the effects of climate and landscape management changes on water resources, vegetation and ecosystems. Land Surface Temperature (LST) is a key parameter in the surface energy budget and, through the evapotranspiration, of the water budget as well. Sinc...

La determinazione della copertura nevosa riveste un ruolo chiave in idrologia, per le previsioni me-teorologiche e nei modelli climatologici in ambienti montani. Per la loro copertura sinottica spaziale e temporale, i dati satellitari offrono un mezzo di sicuro interesse per il monitoraggio del manto ne-voso. In questo studio, le mappe di copertura...