Abstract
The necessity of sustainable development for landscapes has emerged as an important theme in recent decades. Current methods take a holistic approach to landscape heritage and promote an interdisciplinary dialogue to facilitate complementary landscape management strategies. With the socio-economic values of the “natural” and “cultural” landscape heritage increasingly recognised worldwide, remote sensing tools are being used more and more to facilitate the recording and management of landscape heritage. Satellite remote sensing technologies have enabled significant improvements in landscape research. The advent of the cloud-based platform of Google Earth Engine (GEE) has allowed the rapid exploration and processing of satellite imagery such as the Landsat and Copernicus Sentinel datasets. In this paper, the use of Sentinel-2 satellite data in the identification of palaeo-riverscape features has been assessed in the Po Plain, selected because it is characterized by human exploitation since the Mid-Holocene. A multi-temporal approach has been adopted to investigate the potential of satellite imagery to detect buried hydrological and anthropogenic features along with spectral index and spectral decomposition analysis. This research represents one of the first applications of the GEE Python application programming interface (API) in landscape studies. The complete free and open-source software (FOSS) cloud protocol proposed here consists of a Python code script developed in Google Colab which could be simply adapted and replicated in different areas of the world.
Highlights
1.1 Toward a definition of “Landscape Heritage”Landscapes emerge through complex interrelated natural and cultural processes and encompass rich data pertaining to the long-term interactions between humans and their environments
The two moated villages are evident in the FSWIR and Bare Soil Index (BSI) compositions while RGB, HSV and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) images highlight the presence of a palaeochannel that flows southwards from the Terramare Culture (TC) site
S2 satellite imagery has been retrieved in the GEE dataset collection and analysed through a Python script code realized in Colab
Summary
1.1 Toward a definition of “Landscape Heritage”Landscapes emerge through complex interrelated natural and cultural processes and encompass rich data pertaining to the long-term interactions between humans and their environments. The importance of considering landscape’s “natural” and “cultural” heritage values together and promoting interdisciplinary approaches to develop conservation strategies has emerged increasingly strongly over the last decade [5,6] This interdisciplinary perspective is epitomised in the Council of Europe’s European Landscape Convention which defines landscape as ‘an area, as perceived by people, whose character is the result of the action and interaction of natural and/or human factors’ [7]. This international treaty lays out pathways towards sustainable development in landscape based on a balanced and harmonious relationship between social needs, economic activity and the environment
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