Remote sensing in the geomorphological and geoarchaeological study of alluvial plains

In the last two decades rising remote sensing technologies have dramatically changed geomorphological and geoarchaeological investigations. At the same time, an increasing quantity of stratigraphic and earth-surface processes studies have improved knowledge on the evolution of several alluvial plains. Despite the plethora of available data sets, the reconstruction of the landscape evolution in these environments remains challenging, due to the scarce visibility of landforms and the frequent superimposition between natural and anthropogenic processes. A key to shed light on the evolution of these surfaces lies on the signature of fluvial and human activities, which can be revealed through optical and topographic traces. An abundance of these features is present in the Venetian-Friulian Plain, located in North East Italy, which has been chosen as the main study area. With a multi-methodological and interdisciplinary approach, this thesis employs a broad range of remote sensing methods and techniques and integrates different data sets to analyse several case studies. Among the key results, high-resolution Digital Terrain Models (DTMs) derived from Light Detection And Ranging (LiDAR) surveys reveal the topographic surface preserved by old-growth lowland woods; and the integration with optical imagery allows to identify aeolian dunes and relict archaeological depressions. High-resolution oblique aerial photos and daily satellite images are combined to assess the evidence of optical archaeological traces from 2017 to 2023 in order to infer the correlation between visibility parameters. Finally, high-resolution aerial orthophotos are used as input data to train and test a deep learning model to automatically map fluvial palaeochannels. Overall, by considering various data sets, techniques and case studies, this thesis aims to assess how recent and innovative remotely sensed data and methods can be applied to the alluvial plains in order to advance the knowledge about their geomorphological and geoarchaeological evolution.