Cultural Landscape risk Identification, Management and Assessment (CLIMA)

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Europe has rich and diverse cultural heritage resources, which include landscapes and landscape elements, comprising standing monuments, buried archaeological sites, and artefacts. This cultural heritage is endangered by environmental processes and anthropogenic pressures, and specifically by intensive agriculture activities and climate change. These pose a range of immediate and future threats to these sensitive cultural landscapes and the historical, archaeological and environmental archives they preserve. Recent research carried out both in Britain and Italy, has highlighted that at least 70% of archaeological sites in rural areas are subject to direct and physical damages caused by agricultural activity. In addition to direct damages (due to ploughing, drainage, irrigation, etc.), agriculture has also been shown to increase the extent of soil erosion and to affect the soil properties, reducing the ability of the soil to preserve the buried heritage and affecting the structural stability and amplifying the natural deterioration of the exposed structures. Meanwhile, climate change is one of the most important and urgent problems facing us today, with implications for natural and societal systems (agriculture, human health, forestry, and infrastructure) including cultural heritage. The consequences of these pressures are proving to be catastrophic for the European Cultural Landscape as testified by recent collapses in Pompeii and the Aurelian Walls in Rome. The authorities responsible for the preservation of the cultural landscape are well aware of the huge costs required by rehabilitation intervention as compared with preventive ones, hence they require systematic, effective, usable and affordable tools to monitor the degradation process and enabling preventive maintenance.n light of the critical issues described above, monitoring soil processes and soil use changes that can be produced by climate changes (environmental pressures) and agricultural activities (anthropogenic pressures) can therefore help to prevent damages to our buried and exposed archaeological heritage. The CLIMA project aims to promote highly interdisciplinary research, based on one hand on a soil-oriented approach to monitoring and modelling soil based processes that may affect cultural preservation, whilst designing and developing a multi-task WebGIS platform, to combine advanced satellite and ground based remote sensing technologies for mapping and monitoring of cultural landscapes with archaeological remains.The CLIMA platform will be able to create high resolution maps and to document archaeological features (anomalies, soilmarks, cropmarks, etc.) linked to buried remains, by the using and the innovative processing of optical high resolution satellite images. In addition it will be able to generate periodic warning maps aimed at monitoring human and natural changes in the cultural landscapes and in particular, land use change and vegetation change (increase or reduction). CLIMA will also allow the acquisition of time sequences of data concerned with identifying minimal shifts in standing architectural structures, and movements of ground surface related to landslides and subsidence phenomena, as well as alterations of the ground surface related to erosion processes, in order to produce periodic vulnerability maps. Furthermore, an innovative ground-based tool for mapping and monitoring lateral soil erosion and vertical disturbance of soils affected by agricultural activities will be developed utilizing in-situ gamma spectrometry technology to enable real-time, non-destructive drive-over survey of soil erosion across archaeological sites. This will be particularly powerful for monitoring and managing risk from agriculture and land use change in rural cultural landscapes.