In this project, tin order to facilitate the recognition of the glaciers, the region has been divided in hydrographical basins. These basins have been extracted from the DEM ALOS AW3D30 global DEM, at 30 m spatial resolution. The region has been divided in 62 basins.

Sentinel-2 RGB composite image of the Pakistan region used in this inventory. This image is the synthesis of all the images acquired by the Sentinel-2 satellites in the period “2022-07-31" -"2022-10-01. In the Red, Green and Blue channels the SWIR, NIR and Red bands are represented. The main land cover types can be identified: in bright blue the snow, in dark blue the ice, in bright and dark tones of red the bare soils and rocks, and in green the vegetated areas.

This new Pakistan glacier inventory has been extracted from optical data acquired by the European Space Agency Sentinel-2 twin satellites. This choice is dictated by the need to respond to the requirement to have homogeneous coverage of the entire territory under examination in terms of image acquisition dates, cloud cover and good spatial resolution, that allow the recognition of glaciers and their mapping. Furthermore, particular attention in the selection of the data processing and mapping methods was given for the expected prospect activity of updating the glacial perimeters and monitoring changes in the future. The methodology was based on a semi-automatic classification (segmentation) and the mapping has been implemented in a Geographic Information System (GIS) environment. In this new inventory, 13,032 glaciers covering 13,546.93 km2 have been mapped. The available inventory is the Version 1.0.

In the framework of PAPRIKA-italy specific activities were performed to monitoring the quality of water originating from the Karakoram glaciers. Four dedicated hydrological campaigns were performed to assess the quality an quantity of water; in April and July 2011, May 2012 and April 2013. Two permanent hydrometric stations were installed in two key sites, the Shigar Bridge and Paju, providing continuous measurements of water level and hanse, discharge activity and water chemistry.

In the framework of PAPRIKA-italy specific activities were performed to monitoring the quality of water originating from the Karakoram glaciers. Four dedicated hydrological campaigns were performed to assess the quality an quantity of water; in April and July 2011, May 2012 and April 2013. Two permanent hydrometric stations were installed in two key sites, the Shigar Bridge and Paju, providing continuous measurements of water level and hanse, discharge activity and water chemistry.

The research project SHARE PAPRIKA is devoted to determining the state of glaciers and water resources in the Hindu-Kush Karakorum Himalaya region (HKKH) and to estimating their conditions in the coming decades in different climate change scenarios. PAPRIKA included the twin national projects: PAPRIKA-Italy and PAPRIKA-France, having two different focus areas. The main focus area of PAPRIKA-Italy was the Karakorum region, in particular the Baltoro glacier and the upper Indus basin in Northern Pakistan. Another focus of PAPRIKA-Italy was the Changri Nup glacier area, lying on lateral valley of the Khumbu region in Nepal.

One of the most important results of Glaciers & Students Project is the publication of the book that describes the activities end the methods adopted for the recognition and mapping of the 13,032 glaciers in Pakistan in the three ranges of Himalaya, Karakorum and Hindukush. The analysis of the satellite of 2022 gives a precise delineation of the surface of the glaciers and gives the possibility to verify the trend that happened in the last 30 years comparing the previous inventory with the new one. The knowledge of the places that host the glaciers of Pakistan is presented in this book with a series of maps of the 62 basins that occupy the Northern areas of Pakistan. The maps are published with scales aimed at a clear representation of the glacier distribution in each basin. To facilitate the recognition of glaciers in some wide basins, the zoom panels represented in the boxes were produced at the most suitable scale.

As regards glaciers, in the park 50 ice bodies are present covering about 40 km2. Among the others, Forni, at 12 km2 of area the largest Italian valley glacier. Its recent changes underlined a strong relation with regional and global climate evolution (Pelfini & Smiraglia, 1997; Smiraglia et al., 2007; Smiraglia et al., 2008); in addition this glacier was also inserted in the GOSITES list (Diolaiuti & Smiraglia, 2010), a list including all the geomorphological systems to be protected due to their high scientific, environmental and aesthetic values. On Forni Glacier since 2005 has been running the first Italian supraglacial automatic weather station (Citterio et al., 2007). The data collected were useful to model glacier energy and mass exchanges and to describe local micro-meteorology (Diolaiuti at al., 2009; Senese et al., 2010). Not only large glaciers are important for environmental studies; in fact, in the Park also smaller ones revealed important information.

The SHARE STELVIO project was developed by a group of researchers of the University of Milan, the Politecnico of Milan and CNR of Italy in the frame of the SHARE and the SHARE ITALY Projects promoted and managed by Ev-K2-CNR. The program is supported by the Lombardy Region under the umbrella of an agreement between the Lombardy Region and a regional research foundation: FLA (Lombardy Foundation for the Environment). The project aims at detecting and quantifying climate change evidences and effects on a sensible area located in the Italian Alps: The Stelvio National Park – Lombardy sector (600 km2 of area).