Nowadays, effective procedures for the assessment of the stability conditions of rock cliffs and the associated retreat rates is of increasing relevance for the institutions devoted to land management. These phenomena result from a complex interaction between the meteo-marine controlling factors and the geo-structural and geo-mechanical conditions of the rock mass, so that the phenomenological and qualitative approaches, used in the past to deal with this problem, have resulted to be ineffective and inadequate. This research project is aimed at developing a multi-scale quantitative methodology to deal with the prediction of rock cliff retreat phenomena, with the following objectives:
1) large-scale assessment of the retreat rates of rock cliff coastlines highly susceptible to instability phenomena by means of advanced geomorphological techniques and detection of the main driving factors at regional scale;
2) analysis of the sea-air-cliff interaction processes, focusing specifically on the assessment of the extreme wave events and important environmental factors acting on the rock cliffs, as the sea spray;
3) development of a slope-scale methodological procedure for the integration