Google Earth Engine as Multi-Sensor Open-Source Tool for Supporting the Preservation of Archaeological Areas: The Case Study of Flood and Fire Mapping in Metaponto, Italy

Abstract

In recent years, the impact of Climate change, anthropogenic and natural hazards (such as earthquakes, landslides, floods, tsunamis, fires) has dramatically increased and adversely affected modern and past human buildings including outstanding cultural properties and UNESCO heritage sites. Research about protection/monitoring of cultural heritage is crucial to preserve our cultural properties and (with them also) our history and identity. This paper is focused on the use of the open-source Google Earth Engine tool herein used to analyze flood and fire events which affected the area of Metaponto (southern Italy), near the homonymous Greek-Roman archaeological site. The use of the Google Earth Engine has allowed the supervised and unsupervised classification of areas affected by flooding (2013–2020) and fire (2017) in the past years, obtaining remarkable results and useful information for setting up strategies to mitigate damage and support the preservation of areas and landscape rich in cultural and natural heritage.

Flood inundation assessment in the data-scarce region using hydrodynamic models and google earth engine -A case of Ghed region, Ozat River basin, Gujarat, India

“…The results of the simulated flooding must be verified against observed data and satellite imagery (Liu et al 2018;DeVries et al 2020). Recent studies using Google Earth Engine (GEE) algorithms have proven to be excellent approaches with quick findings, lesser complexity, and ease of implementation in similar research areas (Traganos et al 2018;Fattore et al 2021). In 2018, many research papers showed how to use GEE to model floods.…”

Integrated use of multi-temporal multi-sensor and multiscale Remote Sensing data for the understanding of archaeological contexts: the case study of Metaponto, Basilicata.

“…Starting from 2019, the granting of excavation in the "Castrum" area has been entrusted to the School of Specialization in Archaeological Heritage of Matera (SSBA-Unibas) of the University of Basilicata, in collaboration with the CNR. The polis of Metaponto has been of interest since the 18th century, subject of a prolific humanistic [7][8][9][10][11] and scientific [12][13][14][15] literary production. The site is herein analyzed through an integrated use of several Earth observation and remote sensing technologies and ancillary data produced over the years by archaeologists and scholars.…”

Archaeological site identification from open access multispectral imagery: Cloud computing applications in Northern Kurdistan (Iraq)

“…GEE (not to be confused with the Google Earth application that has well‐established applications in the Cultural Heritage field: Luo et al, (2018)) is a recent online resource for large‐scale cloud processing of geospatial data. It has been already experimented for archaeological purposes (Agapiou, 2017; Firpi, 2016), such as the identification of archaeological features in Jordan (Liss et al, 2017); the evaluation of urban sprawl over the area of the Amathus site in Cyprus (Agapiou, 2021) and the city of Matera in Italy (Danese et al, 2021); the assessment of Ethiopian archaeological heritage (Khalaf & Insoll, 2019); the detection of the looting activities on the archaeological site of Apamea in Syria (Agapiou, 2020); the assessment of risks for archaeological sites in Libya and Egypt (Rayne et al, 2020); the reconstruction of palaeolandscape and buried Bronze Age features in the Po Plain in Italy (Brandolini et al, 2021); the estimation of the environmental risks coming from fires and floods on the archaeological site of Metaponto, Italy (Fattore et al, 2021); the hidden parts of the via Appia in Italy (Lasaponara et al, 2022); and the palaeolandscape in proximity of archaeological features in Egypt (Elfadaly et al, 2022).…”