Historical and recent evolution of river mouths in the Marche Region (central Adriatic Italy).

Abstract

The Marche Region (Central Italy) has over 170 kilometers of coastline bathed by the Adriatic Sea, along which several, mostly torrential, streams flow.

In the remote past, the evolution of river mouths and, consequently, of coastlines was determined by climate fluctuations and, over longer periods, by tectonic uplifts.

Starting from the Roman Era, however, human activities in the river basins began to take over, inducing local conditions of resistasia or return to biostasis as a function of complex socioeconomic and demographic dynamics, often connected in turn with climatic modifications.

The influence of human action became increasingly intense with industrialization, generating overall erosion phenomena all along the coastline.

For the last century and a half or so, the availability of cartographic documents and remote sensing images has allowed a quantitative analysis of the changes that have occurred at river mouths and in their immediate vicinity, making it possible to quantify recent evolutionary trends.