Copernicus Sentinel imagery for more risk-resilient historic cities in coastal zones: contribution to the monitoring of Albenga archaeological site and delta of river Centa

Abstract

Earth observation (EO) technologies and products are traditionally providing an extremely important contribution to a more efficient management of built areas and people during emergencies. Their employment could be extremely useful in monitoring and risk assessment of protected monument and sites situated in potentially vulnerable areas such as costal zones. Change detection has a crucial role in such activities, especially in case of hazardous events—on one side, this method can provide inputs in the phases of risk assessment and rapid mapping for immediate response; on the other side, over prolonged periods of time after the event, change detection can be used for purposes of option analysis of technical solutions and for overall recovery planning of the site. Workflow proposed is based on the use of Copernicus Sentinel-2 data to provide the comparison of changes occurring during extreme flooding events of river Centa, Liguria. Firstly, an investigation of NDVI and NDWI of the extreme flooding event occurring in November 2019 was conducted. The event was then put in correlation with another previously studied flooding hazard occurring in 2016 in the same area that has caused severe damages to the archaeological remains of the medieval church of San Clemente, situated within the Centa riverbed. In conclusion, the results from both years have been compared with ground truth data of topographic database in order to observe the extension of the flooded area and to provide contribution to the monitoring activities. The aim of the research was to offer some novel insight for a more informed decision-making during the risk assessment, risk management and resilience phases regarding the vulnerable built heritage sites found in coastal areas.

Satellite-Based Methodology for Purposes of Rescue Archaeology of Cultural Heritage Threatened by Dam Construction

“…The archive of images produced by these satellites is available for free to everyone. Its application has already demonstrated considerable effectiveness in documenting different types of cultural heritage hazards such as flooding [67,68], looting [4,62] and urban sprawl [3,69]. For the scope of the present research, it is worth mentioning that recent research has proved how Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 data can be effectively used for detection of archaeological mounds [70,71].…”

Natural hazards affecting cultural heritage: assessment of flood and landslide risk for the 28 existing Norwegian stave churches

“…In Europe, Italy is the country with a higher number of studies on regions (e.g. Liguria) at high risk of hydrogeological instability with an expected return period of dangerous floods of circa 50 years (Previtali et al, 2018;Cuca, 2020;Cambiaggi and Berardi, 2019;Cigna et al, 2013;Pascale et al, 2013). Unless the number of studies, research highlights the difficulties of building structural measures for DRR, especially in a region like Liguria which is confined between the mountainous territory and the coast, with little space available, or appropriate, for the realization of measure to reduce flooding risk, i.e.…”

“…Similarly, this has been done for landslides, although for this hazard is more common to have building structural monitoring performed in continuous or sporadic geotechnical or laser scanner surveys at support of a risk assessment over an extended time (Cambiaggi and Berardi, 2019;Indirli et al, 2011;Cigna et al, 2013). The literature review shows clearly that the research community is well aligned in terms of research-driven policy framework, as all the works related to churches affected by flooding quote the EU FD, several the Sendai DRR framework, while few the INSPIRE directive IJBPA 42,1 (Moreno et al, 2022;Cuca, 2020). Recent EU and National projects who have driven research on Flood risk assessment and management are: the EU-FP6 Cultural Heritage Protection against Flooding (CHEF), the Risk and Vulnerability in Cultural Heritage (RIVUPH) project funded by Andalusian Government (Ortiz et al, 2016), the EU Risk Indicators for the Analysis of Cultural heritage under Threat project (RIACT) (Figueiredo et al, 2021), the Italian MICHEmitigating the impact of natural hazards on cultural heritage sites, structures and artefacts project for the city of Florence, the NOAH web application program with historical/ real time natural hazards and weather events in the Philippines (Loreto et al, 2021) and the National Flood Insurance program for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) high-risk ranking zone in USA (Paille et al, 2016).…”

“…The selection of the churches as case studies is often based on existing information or maps that highlight their high exposure e.g. flood or landslide susceptibility maps (Cambiaggi and Berardi, 2019;Pascale et al, 2013), created by overlapping cultural heritage assets' location or based on knowledge of past hazards (Previtali et al, 2018;Cuca, 2020;Ilieș et al, 2020). Countries where the research has been conducted might indicate zones more prone to disasters: Portugal, Spain and Italy in the Mediterranean area, the Louisiana in the US and, for multi-hazards, the Philippines.…”

Assessment of water-induced soil erosion as a threat to cultural heritage sites: the case of Chania prefecture, Crete Island, Greece

“…The integration of GIS and RS technologies has been widely used to analyze, map, and retrieve reliable information related to the natural hazards (Agapiou et al, 2015). Special attention has been given to the assessment of several natural hazards at the locations and vicinity of cultural heritage sites (Cuca, 2020;Liu, Xu, Chen, Chen, & Zhang, 2019;Lombardo, Tanyas, & Nicu, 2020;Ortiz, Ortiz, Martín, & Vázquez, 2016;Ravankhah et al, 2019;Salamon, Netzer-Cohen, Cohen, & Zilberman, 2018;Valagussa et al, 2020).…”