Man-made terraces for agricultural purposes are a quite diffuse and ancient anthropogenic landscape modification in mountainous areas. The original slope alteration, obtained through a sequence of sub-vertical and sub-planar surfaces, represents a human interference with the geomorphic system, altering the original balance of geomorphological and geo-hydrological factors. Stone walls and soil formed by human activity have been artificially immobilized on the slopes and are available again to gravitative processes once in abandonment and may be subject to deep degradation in case of intense rain events. However, socio-economic conditions play often a crucial role in the abandonment of terraces, indirectly contributing to increase gully erosion and walls failure. The modification of the original slope profile, due to its regular geometry in respect to the typical more complex natural surface, is rather suitable to be detected through remote sensing, particularly LIDAR, as many authors have recently demonstrated. In the present research the attention has been focused on the assessment of terraces and of the volume of stones and soil that have been involved by human activity. The research area is among the most deeply modified by terraces in the Mediterranean area and internationally famous for this landscape anthropogenic alteration: The Cinque Terre in Italy is a National Park intensively visited by tourists all over the year. Then terraces represent an important economic asset that need to be preserved from degradation and collapse as partially occurred in 2011 after the intense rain event that caused flood, hundreds of landslides and consequently damage. During the 2011 event many terraced slopes have collapsed with significant loss of soil and stone walls: the research allowed to evaluate the lost volumes and to estimate the remaining ones in the Vernazza catchment.

Anthropic interventions at catchment level modify the hydrological morphology and fluxes, especially in the last 50-60 years. In the North-Eastern Romania hilly area for various reasons (the dry conditions - 400-500 mm multiannual rainfall amount – and the need for water, for wetland to arable land conversion and for flooding control), especially in the last 60 years, a big number of reservoirs were built (about 1000 in an 8000 km2 area). These reservoirs were mostly shallow (under 5 m depth) and small in volume (under 10 mil m3) and were filled in 10 to 30 years. The decommissioning of these reservoirs was made mainly through dam breaching in the median part in order to recover the filed reservoir bottom for pastures. This intervention created the conditions of channel incision of these flat surfaces and the development of gully system which tend to evolve toward continuous channels. In the present study we present a database of gullies affecting the dry bottom of decommissioned anthropic lakes from Jijia Hills, north-eastern Romania. The gullies were manually extracted from a Digital Terrain Model (DTM) with 0.5 m cell size. The extraction was performed using shading maps, with support from contour lines maps, slope maps and maps with the edge detection of slope. The gully delineation was also verified through 3D perspective view and through topographic sections, in order to obtain good delineation. We delineated more than 500 gullies, which are predominantly found on dry bottom reservoirs of 2d and 3rd Strahler order catchments. The morphometry of the gullies (length, depth, volume) is directly related to the dimension of the filled reservoir. Thus, there are lengths of 1-2 m for newly created gullies, and up to 800-1000 m for the most developed ones, with big variations of the width as a function of the shape of the gully channel and the evolution stage of gully (newly incised, evolving, fully developed). The depth of gullies ranges from 20-30 cm to 4-5 m and depends on the initial size of the reservoir, the depth of sediment fill and on the dam height. The volume of eroded sediments varies from 20 m3 to up to 70 000 m3 for individual gullies, with a total volume of eroded deposits over 1,000,000 m3. Considering the resulted volumes these types of gullies are one of the most important sediment sources in Jijia Hills region. The bottom reservoir gullies inventory and the estimated sediment volumes provide a database of hot-spots of sediment sources in the north-eastern Romania lowland. This aspect has a great practical importance considering that the majority of these gullies are not fully developed, and their further evolution implies the production of important quantities of sediments in the fluvial system. Furthermore, the same study area is defined by the presence of many dry abandoned reservoirs where the studied types of gullies can appear in the near future in the context of climate change that will increase the torrential rainfall. The presented study is a case of anthropic induced morphology and sediments accumulation (the filled reservoirs) which, through further induced anthropic decommissioning, generated gully morphology and produced sediments through erosion.

Understanding the soil and water conservation (SWC) impact of steep-slope agricultural practices (e.g. terraces) has arguably never been more relevant than today, in the face of widespread intensifying rainfall conditions. In northern Italy, a diverse mosaic of terraced and non-terraced cultivation systems have historically developed from local traditions and more recently from the introduction of machinery. Previous studies suggested that each vineyard configuration is characterised by a specific set of soil degradation patterns. However, an extensive analysis of SWC impacts by different vineyard configurations is missing, while this is crucial for providing robust guidelines for future-proof viticulture. Here, we provide a unique extensive comparison of SWC in 50 vineyards, consisting of 10 sites of 5 distinct practices: slope-wise cultivation (SC), contour cultivation (CC), contour terracing (CT), broad-base terracing (BT) and diagonal terracing (DT). A big-data analysis of physical erosion modelling based on high-resolution LiDAR data is performed, while four predefined SWC indicators are systematically analysed and statistically quantified. Regular contour terracing (CT) ranked best across all indicators, reflecting a good combination of flow interception and homogeneous distribution of runoff and sediment under intense rainfall conditions. The least SWC-effective practices (SC, CC, and DT) were related to vineyards optimised for trafficability by access roads or uninterrupted inter-row paths, which create high upstream-downstream connectivity and are thus prone to flow accumulation. The novel large-scale approach of this study offers a robust comparison of SWC impacts under intense rainstorms, which is becoming increasingly relevant for sustainable future management of such landscapes.