Ricerc@Sapienza

Algal blooms of the water are an important variable for the analysis of freshwater ecosystems, which are relevant not only for human populations but also for plant and animal diversity. Monitoring algal blooms from space allows for a continuous and automatic control without the necessity of water sampling and human intervention. However, it is a very challenging task, which becomes particularly difficult when dealing with cyanobacteria blooms.

Millimetre-wave radiometers will be on board of the future operational Eumetsat Polar System Second Generation (EPS-SG) satellites with the primary objective to support weather and climate models. These radiometers, and in particular the Ice Cloud Imager (ICI), will provide channels from 183 up to 664 GHz at a spatial sampling of 16 km, greatly enhancing ice cloud retrieval capability at global scale to validate and improve microphysics parameterization.

1. Biodiversity includes multiscalar and multitemporal structures and processes, with different levels of functional organization, from genetic to ecosystemic levels. One of the mostly used methods to infer biodiversity is based on taxonomic approaches and community ecology theories. However, gathering extensive data in the field is difficult due to logistic problems, especially when aiming at modelling biodiversity changes in space and time, which assumes statistically sound sampling schemes. In this context, airborne or satellite remote sensing allows information to be gathered

Assessing biodiversity from field-based data is difficult for a number of practical reasons: (i) establishing the total
number of sampling units to be investigated and the sampling design (e.g. systematic, random, stratified) can be
difficult; (ii) the choice of the sampling design can affect the results; and (iii) defining the focal population of
interest can be challenging. Satellite remote sensing is one of the most cost-effective and comprehensive approaches

Understanding biodiversity changes in time is crucial to promptly provide management practices against diversity loss. This is overall true when considering global scales, since human-induced global change is expected to make significant changes on the Earth's biota. Biodiversity management and planning is mainly based on field observations related to community diversity, considering different taxa. However, such methods are time and cost demanding and do not allow in most cases to get temporal replicates.

Forests cover about 30% of the Earth surface, they are among the most biodiverse terrestrial ecosystems and represent the bulk of many ecological processes and services. The assessment of biodiversity is an important and essential goal to achieve but it can results difficult, time consuming and expensive when based on field data. Remote sensing covers large areas and provides consistent quality and standardized data, which can be used to estimate species diversity.

Powerline inspection is an important task for electric power management. Corridor mapping, i.e. the task of surveying the surroundings of the line and detecting potentially hazardous vegetation and objects, is performed by aerial LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) survey. To this purpose, main tasks are automatic extraction of the wires, and measurement of distance of objects close to the line.

Post event flooding maps are currently extracted from synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) and/or optical satellite images or developing using hydraulic model simulations. Several sources of uncertainties impact the accuracy of such flood maps constructed from each method, especially in urban areas. An integrated approach that combines satellite imagines of flooded areas, hydraulic models, and markers from social media that should reduce these uncertainties and allow a more accurate reconstruction of flooded urban areas, is presented in this paper.

Knowledge of a territory is an essential element in any future planning action and in appropriate territorial and environmental requalification action planning. The current large-scale availability of satellite data, thanks to very high resolution images, provides professional users in the environmental, urban planning, engineering, and territorial government sectors, in general, with large amounts of useful data with which to monitor the territory and cultural heritage.

Coastal environments are facing constant changes over time due to their dynamic nature and geological, geomorphological, hydrodynamic, biological, climatic and anthropogenic factors. For these reasons, the monitoring of these areas is crucial for the safeguarding of the cultural heritage and the populations living there. The focus of this paper is shoreline extraction by means of an experimental algorithm, called J-Net Dynamic (Semeion Research Center of Sciences of Communication, Rome, Italy).