Building Cultural Heritage Resilience through Remote Sensing: An Integrated Approach Using Multi-Temporal Site Monitoring, Datafication, and Web-GL Visualization

Alexandra Bevk Neeb,Arianna Campiani,Anaïs Guillem,Scott Mcavoy,Denise Jaffke,Nicola Lercari,Gerardo Jiménez Delgado

doi:10.3390/rs13204130

Abstract

In the American West, wildfires and earthquakes are increasingly threatening the archaeological, historical, and tribal resources that define the collective identity and connection with the past for millions of Americans. The loss of said resources diminishes societal understanding of the role cultural heritage plays in shaping our present and future. This paper examines the viability of employing stationary and SLAM-based terrestrial laser scanning, close-range photogrammetry, automated surface change detection, GIS, and WebGL visualization techniques to enhance the preservation of cultural resources in California. Our datafication approach combines multi-temporal remote sensing monitoring of historic features with legacy data and collaborative visualization to document and evaluate how environmental threats affect built heritage. We tested our methodology in response to recent environmental threats from wildfire and earthquakes at Bodie, an iconic Gold Rush-era boom town located on the California and Nevada border. Our multi-scale results show that the proposed approach effectively integrates highly accurate 3D snapshots of Bodie’s historic buildings before/after disturbance, or post-restoration, with surface change detection and online collaborative visualization of 3D geospatial data to monitor and preserve important cultural resources at the site. This study concludes that the proposed workflow enhances the monitoring of at-risk California’s cultural heritage and makes a call to action to employ remote sensing as a pathway to advanced planning.

Highlights

We aligned our research aims with several goals of the Transforming California State Parks initiative, a state-wide effort to improve cultural and natural resources preservation, park management, and connection with the California public and ensure the CSP System’s long-term sustainability [43]
Our research focused on the historic town of Bodie, a site of state and national significance located in Mono County, in the east-central portion of California (Figure 2)
Visualization by Geospatial control data used in this study were collected by CSP land surveyors in 2015–2017 using Bodie’s permanent control network in combination with a Trimble differential GPS (DGPS) and triangulation by a total station

Summary

Introduction

In the late summer of 2020, the CZU Lightning Complex Fire was ignited by a series of lightning strikes that hit multiple areas across the Santa Cruz Mountains. Due to the continual dense vegetation characterizing the landscape of western Santa Cruz and San Mateo counties and low humidity and high wind conditions, this wildfire spread at a speed of over 400 hectares per hour, burned a total of 86,509 acres, and took over a month to be fully contained [9]. The CZU Lightning Complex Fire resulted in the loss of 1450 structures and one reported fatality [10]. This powerful wildfire destroyed, or severely damaged, an unprecedented number of historically significant buildings and burned over several previously recorded archaeological and tribal cultural resources [10,11]

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Conclusion