摘要：Abstract. Small reservoirs are widely used for storing water, especially forirrigation purposes. During the last decades, in Italy many of thesereservoirs have been dismissed, becoming an untapped resource. As a matterof fact, maintenance problems connected to these structures together withtheir natural tendency to silt have favored the use of other water supplyresources such as withdrawal from wells. The increase of drought periods and the high water volume demand foragricultural purposes suggest to evaluate a full and rational use of allwater resources, leading to a rediscovery and enhancement of untappedresources. Specifically, this research focuses on small reservoirs and ontheir potential contribution to a sustainable water management inagriculture. Unfortunately, there are no reliable data on their number,spatial distribution and potential storage volume. The aim of this work isto define reservoir spatial distribution and evaluate potential availablewater volumes. The upper Tiber river basin has been selected as a case studyfor the methodology proposed. The work starts from the acquisition andre-elaboration of the old census of small reservoirs, evaluating, throughGIS and regression techniques, the distribution over the territory and theavailable volumes. Then the reservoir census and the derived database were updated for the period from 2015 up to 2019 introducing combinedcomputational procedures of remote sensing techniques and GIS, based onsatellite images and water index calculation. The results of the semiautomatic procedure used show good performance in lake identification,making it a promising tool for a fast and reliable water body identificationand evaluation in wide areas.
