Evaluating Sediment Input of Rivers Flowing in the Lagoon of Venice

As a part of a future plan for regional management of river and sea sediments, we want to search alternative methods for measuring and predicting the quantity of sediments conveyed by the rivers flowing directly in the Lagoon of Venice and also to understand what types of measurements may be useful in the future study. Starting from a formulation of the sediment transport of rivers in Equilibrium conditions, the University of Padua has developed a model that, after appropriate calibration, is able to reproduce and reasonably predict the instantaneous sediment transport of a river even in non-equilibrium (Di Silvio et al., 2010). This model, initially developed for large rivers with different upperland watersheds, is meant to be applied in this more limited lowland context, however potentially richer in terms of experimental data.