Title: Green Rivers

Principal Investigator: Walter Bernoldi (University of Trento) | Scientific Person in Charge (University of Padova): Simone Bizzi | Programme: PRIN 2022 PNRR DD 1409 del 14/09/2022

Rivers and their floodplains are among the most complex, dynamic, and diverse ecosystems on Earth. However, in the last century, many rivers in Italy and Europe have been largely impacted by human intervention, through reduction of the available space for river corridors and alterations of the water and sediment supply. River restoration and nature-based solutions for management are now required to invert this trend and guarantee the many ecosystem services that a healthy river can provide. Riparian vegetation is one of the major components of river systems, along with flow and sediment regimes, with a fundamental role in controlling river style and its dynamic evolution. In the last decades, its role has been investigated and understood, but a complete quantification of the geomorphic processes is still lacking. This project aims to quantify riparian vegetation spatial and temporal dynamics and to integrate this improved knowledge into predictive tools for river evolutionary trajectories, including the effects of climate change and river restoration. Considering the key ecosystem services provided by riparian vegetation, shifts in its spatial pattern and age structure likely have far reaching effects on both adjacent terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. Taking advantage of the unprecedented availability of remotely sensed data at global scale, we will provide new insights on the linkages between the hydrologic regime, river morphology and dynamics, and the riparian vegetation structure. In addition, field measurements will be performed, to quantifying the growth and structure of riparian roots. Roots exert the major physical control of riparian vegetation on the geomorphological adjustment of rivers but are still poorly described. The combined results of these two research components will be integrated into predictive models with a twofold objective: on one side, we will explore whether there are thresholds, in river corridor width and flow regime, that are likely to cause a sudden shift in the ecosystem dynamics; on the other side, we will investigate whether changes in the vegetation dynamics and age structure can be used as early warnings of a sudden change in the river system. The projects will foster our ability to design river restoration projects and river management actions, developing predictive tools that can be used to ensure effective and sustainable results for actions such as Measure 3.3 "Restoration of the Po River area" of Mission 2 "Green revolution and ecological transition", Component 4 "Protection of the territory and of the water resources", included in the Next Generation EU – PNRR Program.