Proposal of morphostructural legend for the new geomorphological map of Italy

On behalf of the ISPRA-AIGeo Commission for the new Geomorphological Map of Italy, established since 2014, the Working Groups of the Italian Association of Physical Geography and Geomorphology (AIGeo) took in charge the update of the Geomorphological Legend. Here, we propose a new scheme of the morphostructural section of the Legend, as implemented by the Working Group of Structural, Tectonic, and Volcanic Geomorphology and shared with the institutional Commission. This proposal includes a significant increase in the number of adopted symbols, grouped for the first time in three different categories related to litho-structural, tectonic, and volcanic landforms. The litho-structural landforms have just to be meant as passively controlled by geological structures, being the result of direct expression of those structures or driven by exhumation and morphoselection processes, whereas the tectonic ones are the morphological effects of the recent or active deformation. Moreover, we include a large review of the morphotectonic landforms produced by different surface processes (as discussed and shared with the other WGs). The new morphostuctural legend contains most of the landforms already included in the 1994 official geomorphological legend (Brancaccio et al., 1994), updated by D’Orefice and Graciotti (2015), and several new landforms with new related symbols. The significant increase of symbols is justified by the multiscalar approach adopted in the new cartographic project. Such an approach was developed in the perspective of a new relational geodatabase to be structured according to the EU Legislation (INSPIRE Directive). The layer overlapping of landforms and different bedrock units, also related to weathering and fracturing conditions, is still an open question debated among the different WGs. Some of the new symbols have been selected from maps realized using GIS databases and already published by components of the WG, whereas the others are here proposed for the first time. The new legend has the aim of supporting the natural hazard evaluation especially through real time updating of the geodatabase, to meet the demand of a larger usability by public agencies and private contractors in environmental land management.