Marco Marani, marco.marani@unipd.it
Arianna Miniussi, arianna.miniussi@dicea.unipd.it
Enrico Zorzetto, enrico.zorzetto@duke.edu
Maria Francesca Caruso, mariafrancesca.caruso@phd.unipd.it
Marta Ferrazzi, marta.ferrazzi@dicea.unipd.it

Website: https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=it&user=e6xtSN0AAAAJ

Research areas:

Quantification and management of wetland areas under climate change. Estuarine wetlands provide a wide variety of ecosystem services, including atmospheric carbon uptake, mitigation of storm impacts, promotion of biodiversity, sustaining fisheries, etc. In particular, wetlands are the environment with the highest per unit area atmospheric carbon uptake (e.g. much larger than tropical forests) and attenuate storm surges caused by tropical cyclones, which make these environments key components of climate change mitigation strategies. The Statistical Hydrology and Tidal Geomorphology research group has been internationally active in pushing forward our understanding of the dynamics of these key transitional environments and of how they are responding and will respond to environmental change. The group has also applied this knowledge to developing strategies for the sustainable management of the lagoon of Venice, one of the most important coastal environments globally, from a cultural, economic, and environmental viewpoint. The research group uses field and remote sensing observations of physical and biological properties to develop and test models of the evolution of coastal transitional environments, such as lagoons and estuaries, and to quantify the benefits of a sustainable management in terms of carbon uptake and other important ecosystem services.

Quantification and mitigation of hydrologic extreme event risk. Extreme events, such as floods and storms, are projected to intensify over the course of the current century. The impacts of such intensification are still uncertainly quantified and mitigation strategies lack a quantitative approach to support engineering design. The Statistical Hydrology and Tidal Geomorphology research group developed a novel approach to the statistical modelling of extreme events, with application to rainfall, observed at the ground and from space, floods, and hurricanes. The group has also recently proposed, with specific application to hurricanes in  the Atlantic Ocean, an approach to project the probability of occurrence of extreme hurricanes through the current century.

Keywords: Lagoons, Extreme events, Climate change, Coastal Geomorphology