The SeTe (Sécheresse et Territoires) project was developed within the framework of the European Interreg ALCOTRA, under the leadership of the Province Administration of Imperia and involving 6 other partners from Italy and France, among which the Province Administration of Cuneo. The official project website is here.
The Groundwater Engineering research group participates to the project as the scientific consultant of the Province Administration of Cuneo, performing characterization, monitoring, and modelling activities. The activities conducted by the administration and our research group are framed as a knowledge-gathering activity pursuant to Article 54 of Legislative Decree No. 152/06 on the protection and remediation of the subsoil.
The scope of the project is to promote a more efficient water resource management through actions aimed at mitigating the risks associated with extreme climatic events such as droughts and floods, while raising awareness within local communities. The project also foresees a strong involvement of the community and local stakeholders, such as irrigation consortia.
During the year 2022, Piedmont faced the worst drought conditions in the last 75 years, as rainfall scarcity started in summer 2021. In response, the SeTe ALCOTRA project explores the feasibility of MAR pilot actions in three different sites in the province of Cuneo. This area, heavily reliant on water-intensive activities like agriculture, has recently faced water deficit in the summer, when the water demand is higher. The issue is not the annual water availability, but its uneven distribution throughout the year.
Therefore, the project idea is to exploit water coming from the Alps flowing in the dense canal network of the Cuneo plain that, out of the irrigation season, eventually discharges into surface streams. This water can be injected in the subsurface through infiltration trenches or injection wells when not needed for agriculture, using the aquifer as a storage and, during summer, taking advantage of the resulting groundwater availability increase. A peculiarity of the area is the presence of fontanili, drainage trenches dug since the Middle Age to reclaim marshy lands by draining groundwater and making it available for downstream uses. MAR is therefore being tested to also mitigate the flow decrease of fontanili observed during the summer droughts of 2021 and 2022.
Photos of a fontanile in dry conditions (left) and of an active fontanile draining groundwater (right).
The preparatory steps for the MAR pilot infrastructures implementation are the geological, hydrological and hydrogeological characterization of the area, with the collection of data to reconstruct the climatic effects on the water resource and on the fontanili yield, the characterization of the vadose zone and of the aquifer through grain size distribution analysis, Lefranc tests and pumping tests, the activation of a monitoring network installing water pressure dataloggers in existing wells and newly constructed piezometers, on-site surveys to identify the most suitable locations for water infiltration and the design of the MAR systems.
The project activities have so fare been disseminated at several public events:
Conference oral presentations
- Algarotti P., Gandolfo M., Casasso A., Vigna B., presentation of the project at a public event on water resources in Morozzo (Cuneo) on April 11, 2024
- Taramasso M. A., Secco E., Gandolfo M., Algarotti P., Vigna B., Fiorucci A., Tosco T., Sethi R., Casasso A., Il progetto SeTe-ALCOTRA per studiare la fattibilità e i benefici della ricarica controllata degli acquiferi (MAR) nella pianura cuneese, presented at the XVIII GIT Conference in Montereale Valcellina (PN) on June 18, 2024.
Conference posters
- Taramasso M. A., Study and experimentation of Managed Aquifer Recharge (MAR) in the province of Cuneo, PhD Day of Civil and Environmental Engineering, on October 17, 2024, Politecnico di Torino.
- Secco E., Taramasso M. A., Gandolfo M., Algarotti P., Vigna B., Fiorucci A., Tosco T., Sethi R., Casasso A., Studio sulla ricarica controllata dell’acquifero (Managed Aquifer Recharge – MAR) in provincia di Cuneo, U-NIGHT, September 27, 2024, Torino.
