Understanding land subsidence in salt marshes of the Venice Lagoon from SAR Interferometry and ground-based investigations

The existence of salt marshes and tidal morphologies is strictly connected to their elevation with respect to the mean sea level. Quantifying land subsidence of these high-valued transitional environments is therefore crucial to investigate their long-term possible survival, also in view of the expected climate changes. However, monitoring with a certain accuracy their movements has been challenging until now due to the peculiar features of these morphological forms: they are difficult to access, made of largely unconsolidated deposits, without anthropogenic structures, relatively far from anthropogenic facilities, and become submerged by the sea water twice a day. For these reasons, they have never be linked to traditional levelling and GPS networks, and also standard Interferometric SAR applications returned very poor results in terms of spatial and temporal coverage. An advanced Persistent Scatterer Interferometry (PSI) technique on a 5-year long stack of X-bandwidth SAR acquisitions of the Venice Lagoon is here presented. The regularity of the acquisitions, the short satellite revisiting time (11 days), the high image resolution (~ 3 × 3 m), and the strategies used in the PSI application have allowed us to detect thousands of measurable persistent targets (PTs) in the Venice Lagoon salt marshes. The measured displacements range from small uplifts to subsidence rates of more than 20 mm/yr. The analyses of the observed displacements point out that land subsidence is much larger on man-made than natural salt marshes, with a significant negative correlation with the marsh age. In addition, land subsidence with the presence of halophytic vegetation species is generally smaller than on unvegetated marshes. Finally, at a few selected sites, the integration of the PSI outcome with local ground-based measurements, such as multi-depth benchmarks, feldspar marker horizons and surface elevation tables, has allowed quantifying the displacement variability versus depth and therefore developing a first conceptual model of the salt marsh consolidation and accretion processes.