SOIL SEALING DETECTION
Soil sealing identifies the conversion from healthy green land to artificial industrialized and urban areas. It is connected with various criticalities, such as the impoverishment of agricultural land, the unbalanced heat exchange, the variation of drainage conditions of soils, the spatial and ecological fragmentation, and urban dispersion. On the contrary, conserving open space and farmlands creates economic, environmental, and social benefits, thus reducing the rate of consumption is desirable and it is one of major objectives for European Council and United Nation who aim to control and reduce it to zero toward 2050.
In the last years, the need for measuring soil sealing has consolidated. However, the problem is sometimes tackled using qualitative methods, without considering to introduce some indicators of settlement sustainability that could take into account the quantity and the shape of new conversions.
GEO-K develops advanced algorithms based on Artificial Intelligence to detect and monitor land-use changes from natural lands to urban areas, also exploiting time series of satellite products. The analysis take advantages of medium and high resolution multispectral products, increasing the accuracy and speeding up the work of photointerpreters.