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The 18th World Lake Conference, entitled “Governance, Resilience, and Sustainability of Lakes for a Better Society” was held virtually from November 9th to 11th, 2022 at the University of Guanajuato, Mexico. This forum was designed with the primary objective of providing a space where scientists, professionals, students, managers, and practitioners could propose, share, and learn about studies, strategies, and actions which enhance the management of lakes around the world. Different activities were contemplated and scheduled in the organization of this forum, such as conferences, special sessions, technical sessions, and workshops where 194 distinguished investigators and participants shared the results of their research and the knowledge they have gained over the years.

The conditions of high hydraulic risk are mainly due to the interference between the river network and bridges, their relative access ramps and road embankments located in the floodplain. Actually, bridges are not always structurally adequate to withstand severe flood waves. In flood restoration works, there is an objective difficulty in implementing the structural safety of bridges because of historical, artistic and economic issues. Thus, the risk mitigation strategy often accounts for the assessment of the vulnerability degree of each bridge/road embankment according to an evaluation scale. Here we present a methodology regarding the classification of the vulnerability degree and its application to 84 works located in the alluvial area of the Tiber River, in the area of the Province of Perugia. For the purposes of a synthetic classification of works vulnerability, the individual assessed parameters are compared by means of subsequent contingency tables in order to compute the resulting vulnerability degree.

The International Commission on Irrigation and Drainage (ICID) was set up in 1950, with support from 11 countries as Founder Members, including Italy. Ital-ICID is the Italian National Committee of ICID founded in 1971, and is a scientific, technical, and professional not-for-profit organization working in the field of irrigation, drainage, land reclamation, and flood management, in accordance with the topics of the International Commission.In this moment the environmental protection and the green economy are a very important goals, in this contest the ICID promotes and achieves equitable and sustainable development in agriculture water management. The actions of ICID are dedicated to improving the status of agricultural water management practices including rain-fed agriculture, supplemental irrigation, deficit irrigation and full irrigation, with a particular attention to the areas involved in extreme climate events, such as flood and droughts. ICID approach suggests cooperation rather than competition, and collaboration rather than individual actions to pave the way towards effective water management for securing the right of each and every individual to attain a fair share of water, food, energy, and stressed on the need to promote environment-friendly traditional wisdom.ICID develops many annual and special publications promoting its activities, but “Irrigation and Drainage Journal” is the official international journal, and the flagship publication of ICID. It is a prestigious, peer-reviewed specialized publication that publishes papers on all scientific, technical, environmental and socio-economic issues associated with irrigation, drainage and flood management. The journal covers a wide range of subjects centering on dissemination of experience and new ideas in the quest for the sustainable use and protection of water and land to meet the World's increasing demand for food. Only in the last issues more than ten papers have been published concerning study on arid and semi-arid area, which involve the human intervention in the control of water for sustainable agricultural development.For the future, ICID works towards enabling balance between agricultural and water policies, improving publicly operated irrigation schemes, advocating increased public and private investment in expansion of irrigated land, and modernizing existing infrastructure. The knowledge-based sharing of all aspects of agricultural water management, including collation of irrigation statistics, data and information exchange, sharing of successful management strategies, best practices, and local community involvement will be supported by ICID. It supports and encourages the multiple use of water, the use of non-conventional waters and the promotion of goods and services provided by irrigation systems, also supported by Information and Technology Communication tools. The cooperation mechanisms in ICID’s network are based on simple exchange of information through annual meetings, where practitioners, researchers and planners from all over the world share latest research and innovations. However, ICID also organizes triennial world irrigation and drainage congresses, world irrigation fora, regional conferences and workshops to address and discuss agricultural water management issues at global or regional level.

Despite a detailed knowledge of the spatial-temporal dynamics of irrigation being necessary to optimize the agricultural production without exacerbating the pressure exercised on the water resource, such information is still often lacking worldwide. In this study, a double-scale analysis on the detectability of the irrigation occurrence over an area in central Italy through remote sensing soil moisture is proposed; the period of interest is a 3-year time span from 2017 to 2019. The detectability of district- or sub-district-scale irrigation signals through remotely sensed soil moisture data is investigated at two different spatial resolutions: 1 km and plot scale. Three soil moisture products sampled at 1 km resolution are evaluated: a DISPATCH (DISaggregation based on Physical And Theoretical scale CHange) downscaled version of SMAP (Soil Moisture Active Passive) and two Sentinel-1-derived products, namely the 1 km version delivered by Copernicus and a plot-scale-born version developed by THEIA and aggregated at 1 km. The THEIA Sentinel-1 product aggregated at 100 m is used in the plot-scale analysis. Over the study area, the irrigation extent is determined by the fragmentation of the agricultural fields and the complex topography, making the adoption of plot-scale data necessary. Satisfactory results are obtained by comparing maps of irrigated areas at 100 m spatial resolution produced through the k-means clustering algorithm with ground-truth data, since the method fails only once out of seven in properly reproducing the irrigated or non-irrigated conditions occurred over four pilot agricultural fields.

In many countries, water supplies are limited and must be managed for different uses. Providing additional resources for irrigation can be an expensive option, with an unsustainable impact on small farms and on the environment. Therefore, the main efforts should concentrate on the optimal management of existing water resources, paying particular attention to the adequate management of water demands. In Italy, the majority of scattered smallholder farmers are not provided with enough information on how to correctly manage water for irrigation. This paper presents the developing of a web-based irrigation decision support system adaptable and scalable to individual farms. The irrigation advisory service has been calibrated and validated for pomegranate trees, aubergine, and zucchini through 2 years of tests, in a farm in Southern Italy (Calabria). The results are very satisfactory, both in terms of water resources management for irrigation, and for the feedback provided by the farmers involved in the project. Future development regarding the application of wireless technology in smart irrigation is also evaluated.

Small reservoirs are widely used for storing water, especially for irrigation purposes. During the last decades, in Italy many of these reservoirs have been dismissed, becoming an untapped resource. As a matter of fact, maintenance problems connected to these structures together with their natural tendency to silt have favored the use of other water supply resources such as withdrawal from wells. The increase of drought periods and the high water volume demand for agricultural purposes suggest to evaluate a full and rational use of all water resources, leading to a rediscovery and enhancement of untapped resources. Specifically, this research focuses on small reservoirs and on their potential contribution to a sustainable water management in agriculture. Unfortunately, there are no reliable data on their number, spatial distribution and potential storage volume. The aim of this work is to define reservoir spatial distribution and evaluate potential available water volumes. The upper Tiber river basin has been selected as a case study for the methodology proposed. The work starts from the acquisition and re-elaboration of the old census of small reservoirs, evaluating, through GIS and regression techniques, the distribution over the territory and the available volumes. Then the reservoir census and the derived database were updated for the period from 2015 up to 2019 introducing combined computational procedures of remote sensing techniques and GIS, based on satellite images and water index calculation. The results of the semi automatic procedure used show good performance in lake identification, making it a promising tool for a fast and reliable water body identification and evaluation in wide areas.

Problems in the sustainable exploitation of water resources are mainly due to the spatial distribution of uses and are worsened by uncontrolled withdrawals by different activities. In this context, in order to evaluate and manage the available water resources, a decision support system has been developed to support the decision-making processes. This system was implemented on a web platform, in order to manage spatial data and to analyze information on water resources. The system also integrates a WEB-GIS engine for the elaboration and regionalization of data over the river network. The web architecture also makes these tools widely accessible and easily shareable by all stakeholders. The Web-based application was tested successfully in the Tiber River Basin (Central Italy) and focuses on the building of a hydrological database together with an evaluation model for surface water resources. The results provide synthetic information on the sustainability of water allocation scenarios, with particular regard to the feasibility of allowing new dissipative water withdrawal, such as dissipative water use in agricultural production for precision irrigation. The software technology of this project relies on open source code and can also be applied in other fields for the sustainable management of environmental resources.

Hydrological uncertainty due to daily flow variability and to the effect of climate change on water resources is a critical topic in the feasibility evaluations of hydro-power projects, especially for run-of-river power plant. The effect produced by these factors on the annual energy output of such type of plant was investigated. Empirical methods to improve the performance of the plant are proposed, which enable the choice of the most suitable design flow (Q d ) according to the hydrological features of the river, to the frequency of dry and wet years in the basin and to the target energy production.

The proliferation of mobile devices and the emergence of wireless location-based services has generated consumer demand for availability of GPS in urban and indoor environments. This demand calls for enhanced GPS algorithms that accommodate high degrees of signal attenuation and multipath effects unique to the "urban channel." This paper overviews the market for location-based services and discusses algorithmic innovations that address challenges posed by urban environments.

This paper presents the experience of the doctorate in “Rural Sustainable Development, land and environment” of the Faculty of Agriculture at the University of Perugia (Italy). The entire period of activity of the doctorate, founded in the academic year 2000/2001, including the ongoing cycles, covers a time span of 15 years with 10 cycles completed. Its principal aim was the training of researchers and managers with good skills to address the integration and sustainability of interventions within rural and environmental systems. All the doctoral students who have completed the course until now, six months after the acquisition of the Ph.D., had an employment contract or a job. At the present time 17 % of them are uin permanent employment at Italian Universities, 29 % have a fixed-term contract at the Italian University, 27 % are in Public-authority, 10 % are in Private authority and 17 % are Professional Agronomists. After the last reform of the Italian University, the doctorate has been incorporated into the new doctorate “Energy and Sustainable Development” of the Biomass Research Centre. This will be a single training course in which all major issues related to sustainable development will be handled: engineering, energy, environment, land-use planning, economy and medicine.

The present study evaluates the effects of river run-off regime and hydrological uncertainty on the hydroelectric production of a run-of-river power plant. The mean annual energy from a plant was modeled as a function of run-off regime and design flow, by means of a procedure developed on the mean annual Flow Duration Curves (FDCs) of 15 sample basins in the Umbria Region (Central Italy). Results show that energy output decreases from constant to torrential regimes, following a potential function, and that, the greater the design flow, the greater the rate of decrease. The treatment and validation of these results provided a useful tool for easy identification of optimal design flow, according to the hydrological features of the basin and the target hydroelectric production at the station. Analyses of FDCs with a 20-year return period also showed that the decrease in energy production in dry years and its increase in wet years, compared with the mean annual value, are linearly linked to the design flow. In the present context of possible climate change, this result is presented as the possibility of partially controlling the effects of positive or negative flow rate trends. The results reported here can be applied to any kind of river and hydraulic technology at the power station.

Lake Trasimeno is a closed lake in Central Italy and in historically its water level has been affected by wide fluctuations mostly depending on the climate. The lake has suffered many water crises due to water scarcity and in recent decades, droughts have also severely affected the economic and environmental situation. The aim of this study was to analyze the possibility of limiting these severe level fluctuations by evaluating of feasible water resource management policies that could also reduce the environmental stress of this area. Therefore, a specific decision support system (DSS) has been developed in order to simulate different scenarios for the entire water system of the Trasimeno area. In particular, the hydrological model implemented in the DSS allowed for the simulation and validation of different management policy hypotheses for the water resource in order to mitigate environmental and water crises for the Lake Trasimeno. Results indicated that it is possible to transfer a certain amount of water from nearby reservoirs without affecting the availability of the resource for specific users. In this way, Lake Trasimeno can benefit both from an increase in water levels in the lake, so a possible better situation in quantitatively and qualitatively.

Perceptual organization provides an intermediate representation of data by means of object- and goal-independent information. The lack of complete information makes perceptual organization an intrinsically ambiguous process which invalidates the uniqueness assumption and requires instead the generation of multiple solutions. This raises the issue of eliminating redundancies which, in a recursive algorithm, might otherwise cause combinatorial explosion of the search space. These aspects of perceptual organization are illustrated in the context of cycle detection in a contour graph. A provably correct algorithm for this problem is proposed.

The problem of edge detection is viewed as a hierarchy of detection problems where the geometric objects to be detected (e.g., edge points, curves, regions) have increasing complexity and spatial extent. An early stage of the proposed hierarchy consists in detecting the regular portions of the visible edges. The input to this stage is given by a graph whose vertices are tangent vectors representing local and uncertain information about the edges. A model relating the input vector graph to the curves to be detected is proposed. An algorithm with linear time complexity is described which solves the corresponding detection problem in a worst-case scenario. The stability of curve reconstruction in the presence of uncertain information and multiple responses to the same edge is analyzed and addressed explicitly by the proposed algorithm.

This paper discusses various methods for calculating the minimum instream flows for the protection of aquatic life for the purpose of illustrating its increasing complexity. These procedures are the Montana method (Tennant, 1976); the wetted perimeter method (Collings, 1974; Cochnauer, 1976) and the IFIM method (Instream Flow Incremental Methodology; Bovee, 1982). An analysis is then made of some regionalisation criteria based on these methods, from which useful suggestions can be drawn for the development of a procedure to be applied to basins. A method is thus proposed for calculating the recommended flows for protecting the aquatic environment based on simple hydrological variables, such as Q7 10, which can be estimated for a basin on the basis of area A and a Base Flow Index (BFI) which summarises its hydrogeological characteristics. This approach can be used when the field data necessary for more complex methods is not available. These require the defining of the environmental suitability of a watercourse for certain designated reference fish species, according to the flow and the morphology of the channel. The positive results of this approach were verified by Leonard (1990) and this methodology was applied to the Tiber river basin.

The importance of simulation models to assess the impacts of droughts and the effects of mitigation options on water supply systems is well known. However a common procedure about the exploitation of model results is not established yet. Vulnerability is used to characterize the performance of the system, and it can be a helpful indicator in the evaluation of the most likely failures. In this paper a water allocation model is applied to the water supply system of the upper Tiber Basin (Central Italy) in which both surface waters (rivers, reservoirs) and ground waters (wells, springs) are exploited to feed mainly irrigation and civil users. Drought vulnerability indices are calculated to analyze the performance of the supply system under different climate and management conditions. Water shortage scenarios are simulated as a progressive reduction of mean precipitation, an increase in its standard deviation or a combination of both. The model shows that the safety of the water supply system mainly relies on the reservoirs and that the foreseen increased exploitation of the springs to replace contaminated wells, could be seriously limited by discharge decrease during fall. The vulnerability reduction obtained by a hypothetical augmentation of the storage capacity through additional small reservoirs was positively tested by the model. In conclusion vulnerability indices and synoptic risk maps demonstrated to be useful tools to analyze the model outputs. They provide easy-to-read scenarios to be used in a decision making framework considering negotiating among the main users.

A method to estimate complex objects is to aggregate local estimates of object fragments. Given uncertainties and ambiguities in the interpretation of these locally estimated fragments, it is usually necessary to maintain multiple hypotheses about fragment aggregates. This introduces redundancies in the representation of each object which can increase exponentially with the size of the objects. A simple procedure to prune redundancies is proposed and analyzed for the problem of estimating objects which can be decomposed into linearly ordered sets of parts.

Efficient edge detection algorithms such as Canny's (1986) fail near curve singularities. Moreover, the standard linking algorithms used on top of these detectors often fail because of instabilities in the tracking process (due to multiple responses to the same edge and interference of nearby edges). We propose a hierarchical approach to edge detection based on a graph stabilization method that allows bifurcation resolution in stages. Curve singularities are recovered at the last stage by using "top-down" feedback to select the best curve connections.

Conventional edge linking methods perform poorly when multiple responses to the same edge, bifurcations and nearby edges are present. We propose a scheme for curve inference where divergent bifurcations are initially suppressed so that the smooth parts of the curves can be computed more reliably. Recovery of curve singularities and gaps is deferred to a later stage, when more contextual information is available.

The main objective of the study is to optimize the agronomical variables for prediction of water quality at river basin scale for various time intervals using the numerical modeling of the cumulative impact of agricultural operations due to the use of chemical inputs and specific tillage. SWAT (Soil & Water Assessment Tool) model was developed to determine with reasonable accuracy the effect of potential management decisions regarding the water use, sediment transport, and chemical transformations of substances discharged into surface waters in rural ungauged basins. The information flow must start with the adaptation of the inputs required by the SWAT model for the accurate definition of Hydrological Response Units that include unique combinations between slope, soil type, and land use/land cover. All thematic layers must be related to the same coordinate system using the 1970 stereographic projection and Dealul Piscului 1970 geographic coordinate system that are in force in Romania. The meteorological inputs used in SWAT include rainfall, maximum and minimum temperature, solar radiation, relative humidity and wind speed. The prediction of SWAT model considering the diffuse sources of pollution (land areas with intensive agriculture) were analyzed considering the cropping technologies used in various Romanian hydrographical basins, i.e. Ialomita River, Calmatui River, Teleajen River, and Mostistea River. The main constraints observed in the use of SWAT model for efficient predictions in various control sections can be adjusted by the careful selection/adaptation of inputs, the optimal calibration/sensitivity analysis of the model, and the updating of information regarding the land use/land cover in a specific river basin.

Satellite-tracked drifter data and meteorological wind measurements indicated summer bora event of 22 - 25 June 1995 as interesting from both meteorological and oceanographic point of view. The studied summer situation was controlled by a mesoscale atmospheric disturbance that imparts strong cyclonic vorticity to the wind field, with the orographic effect being of secondary importance. During the bora event currents of 70 cm s-1 were measured by drifter movements tracked along the western Adriatic coast. Drifter trajectories for the selected period were simulated by an oceanographic model forced by the outputs of two mesoscale meteorological models, ALADIN and MM5, and by river discharges. The atmospheric models provided realistic space- and time-varying atmospheric fields (wind, air temperature and humidity) with ca 10 km horizontal resolution by ALADIN and with 9 and 3 km by MM5. Several numerical experiments with different combinations of the three forcing agents – wind stress, river discharges and surface heat fluxes – were performed. Proper formulation of the drag coefficient was crucial for the correct simulations of the drifter trajectories, as its increased values do reproduce well the effects of the sea surface roughness and atmospheric stability to the surface ocean layer with respect to the observed drifter movements. Numerical experiments revealed that strong current along the western Adriatic coast resulted from a combined influence of the wind stress and river discharges. The importance of the baroclinic, buoyancy driven contribution to the current field was particularly pronounced in the periods with weak winds. At the same time, drifter movements in the open sea area in front of the eastern Istrian coast were the result of the wind stress acting solely.

At Mt. Etna, high-energy Plinian eruptions took place in the past (e.g., 122 BC), and still represent the major volcanic threat for the town of Catania and its surroundings. By investigating the H2O-CO2-SO2- H2S-silicate melt system, we could track the pathlines of magmatic degassing and give insights into the phenomena determining the evolution of volcanic activity towards either high- or low-energy eruptions. Thermodynamic modeling of liquid-gas properties allowed us to describe gas evolution up to surface under various conditions as long as information was provided in order to estimate a) the redox buffer holding over the PTX range of interest, b) the bulk composition, including total (dissolved+exsolved) volatile contents, c) indicators for closed vs. open system degassing. The results we present give further insights into the deep-roots features of the magmatic feeding system, and confirm the large amount of carbon dioxide that have been already found in the literature. We compared the information retrieved from melt inclusions of the 122 BC plinian event to those from more recent eruptions (e.g. February 1999). From a volatile point of view, the deeper part of the plumbing system shows almost unchanged chemical and thermobarometric features. However, the focus on the conjugated chemical and isotopic features of sulfur allowed us to investigate the differing sulfur degassing patterns drawn by these two eruptions. It seems that elucidating the processes controlling S chemistry during the evolution of Etna magmas, from classic Strombolian or fire-fountain based activity to plinian eruptions may provide useful indications to discriminate the evolution to either high or low-energy eruptions.