Weather induced post failure kinematics of a highway embankment founded on a marly sandstone slope.

A highway embankment founded on a sloping tectonised marly-sandstone flysch formation located in the Apennines chain (Italy) has been affected for about 30 years by continuous slow movements. Given the strategic importance of the involved infrastructure, different investigation and monitoring campaigns have been carried out to get information about the properties of the involved soils and collect data about the displacements and piezometric regime. Field monitoring, in particular, reveals that the observed displacements result from a failure mechanism involving both the embankment and the foundation soils.

Assessing the WEPP model performance for predicting daily runoff in three terrestrial ecosystems in western Syria.

Soil erosion is one of the main threats facing the agriculture and natural resources sector all over the world, and the same is true for Syria. Several empirical and physically based tools have been proposed to assess erosion induced soil losses and runoff driving the processes, from plot to regional spatial scales. The main goal of this research is to evaluate the performance of the Water Erosion Prediction Project (WEPP) model in predicting runoff in comparison with field experiments in the Al-Sabahia region of Western Syria in three ecosystems: agricultural lands (AG), burned forest (BF) and forest (FO).

Bioclimatic pattern in a Mediterranean mountain area: assessment from a classification approach on a regional scale.

The present work analyses the main weather patterns over the period 1981-2010 in the Central Apennines (Italy), drawing upon data from 23 monitoring stations spanning a wide elevation range (260-1750 m asl). Cluster analysis was used to identify homogeneous units and to verify the effectiveness of the bioclimatic classification by crossing the results derived from the application of hierarchical and non-hierarchical classification techniques. The results reveal a diversified picture of five clusters that depends on several factors as elevation, the geographic position within or outside the mountainous range, and the regional morphological traits.