Landslide hazard in the Prosecco area and the impact of vineyard activity

This paper’s area of interest, a hogback hill range between the municipalities of Conegliano and Valdobbiadene, is characterized by steep slopes intervalled by short stretches of plain terrain. Landslide phenomena are quite frequent, influenced by the rainfall regime and facilitated by the land’s morphology, but usually too small and inconsequential to raise notice, therefore not monitored. Another characterization of this area is the production of wine; viticulture in the Prosecco area dates back centuries, but it wasn’t until after the second world war that Prosecco wine started gaining some traction in the national market, and only in the last couple of decades it has experienced the economic boom that made it one of the most appreciated Italian wines on the global market. An expansion of that scale entails changes to land use, with resulting consequences on the surrounding environment. The objective is to understand the impact on landslide susceptibility. Although it would require a proper space-time data driven research over the course of a few years to truly assess all the different ways in which vineyard activity has impacted landslide susceptibility, this paper starts by creating two comparable landslide susceptibility maps (LSMs); the only difference between them being the conditioning factor of land cover. For one of the maps a land cover file from the year 2000 was used, for the second map the land cover file is instead from the year 2018. Both maps were built through Random Forest machine learning model, and, with the obvious exception of land cover, the rest of the data given to the model remained unchanged. Results yielded similar LSMs; when observing change in landslide susceptibility it was found that land cover does play a role, albeit not a crucial one, in determining susceptibility of the area. This paper limits its evaluation to what is described above; in the future it might become part of a larger, multidisciplinary study concerning the impact of the Prosecco industry on all aspects of the natural environment; furthermore, turn that research into practical and sustainable solutions which winemakers may choose to implement in their agricultural practices.