Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences

Abstract. Mountain watersheds are particularly vulnera-ble to extreme meteorological events, such as high intensity rainfall, and mountain soils often show pronounced fragility and low resilience due to severe environmental conditions. Alpine soil vulnerability is partly intrinsic but in part related to climate change (mainly precipitation regimes), and is en-hanced by the abandonment of rural mountain areas that re-duced the land maintenance actions traditionally carried out by farmers and local populations in the past. Soil hazards are related to different processes such as water erosion, loss of consistency, surface runoff and sediment transport, of-ten occurring simultaneously and interacting with each other. Therefore, the overall effects on soil are not easy to quan-tify as they can be evaluated from different soil chemical and physical properties, referring to specific soil loss phenom