Assessing, measuring and modelling erosion in calanchi areas: a review

<em>Calanchi</em> are erosion landforms characterised by a heavily dissected terrain with steep, unvegetated slopes and channels with a dendritic pattern, which rapidly incise and extend headwards. Recent literature focusing on badland systems highlights their similarity with other larger fluvial landforms, stating that these behave as a full size laboratory, due to their rapid development in space and time and to the diversity of geomorphic processes involved. In this paper, a brief review of the most important results on badland research is firstly presented. Then, the morphometric similarity between <em>calanchi</em> and other erosion landforms is discussed. Finally, models quantitatively relating the volume of sediments eroded from <em>calanchi</em> landforms and a set of geometric features of their tributary areas, by exploiting the dimensional analysis and the self-similarity theory, are presented