Geodaysit 2023

Agricultural activities are responsible of huge amounts of solid wastes. Agro-residues are a large quantity. Their utilization as a source of biomass is a great opportunity in the optic of the spread of the circular economy model. Among the agro-residues, those coming from olive groves, vineyard and fruit plantations can be particularly relevant. Biomass residues from agricultural pruning represent a typical case of agro-residues yearly produced and hardly ever used as a resource for production of energy, biochemical or other products. Mismanagement practices and especially burning of those agricultural waste are very common. These cause serious human and environmental health problems and threaten food and energy security.
For a more sustainable and circular approach in agriculture, agro-residues, as those from pruning, should not be considered as waste, but as a precious resource. To pursue this aim, there is a need of overcoming the technical and logistic problems that farmers experience. A proper management system for biomass from pruning residues is mandatory.
This study pretends to contribute to the development of a proper wise collection system for agricultural biomass from pruning. The approach based on a territorial analysis using a software GIS is followed.
At first, the study investigates the types, production processes and possible optimal sustainable uses of biomass residues, highlighting the main issues of the most spread practices. Then, the objective is to map the production of the agricultural pruning residues on the territory. The attention is focused on an area particularly suited to agriculture in the Apulia Region (Italy). By using pruning indices for each crop and the land use map, the study manages to quantify and localize the pruning residues. Based on this, the best position of the collection centres is defined. The obtained maps can be easily used and updated. The study points out the power of the GIS tools for this purpose. The results of this study represent a first important step towards the improvement of the agro-residues management system and can help policymakers and stakeholders to promote more sustainable actions.

Over the last decades, remote sensing techniques have contributed to supporting cultural
heritage studies and management, including archaeological sites as well as their territorial context and
geographical surroundings. This paper aims to investigate the capabilities and limitations of the new
hyperspectral sensor PRISMA (Precursore IperSpettrale della Missione Applicativa) by the Italian
Space Agency (ASI), still little applied to archaeological studies. The PRISMA sensor was tested on
Italian terrestrial (Alba Fucens, Massa D’Albe, L’Aquila) and marine (Sinuessa, Mondragone, Caserta)
archaeological sites. A comparison between PRISMA hyperspectral imagery and the well-known
Sentinel-2 Multi-Spectral Instrument (MSI) was performed in order to better understand features and
outputs useful to investigate the aforementioned areas. At first, bad bands analysis and noise removal
were performed, in order to delete the numerically corrupted bands. Principal component analysis
(PCA) was carried out to highlight invisible details in the original image; then, spectral signatures of
representative areas were extracted and compared to Sentinel-2 data. At last, a classification analysis
(ML and SAM) was performed both on PRISMA and Sentinel-2 imagery. The results showed a full
agreement between Sentinel and PRISMA data, enhancing the capability of PRISMA in extrapolating
more spectral information and providing a better reliability in the extraction of the features.
these first analyses, applied in landscape archaeology studies, highlight
the great spectral operational capabilities of the PRISMA sensor. In future studies, a great
advantage can be brought by performing a reliable pansharpening in order to increase
the resolution of the final images (geometric resolution from pancromathic and spectral
resolution from hyperspectral data), as well as a more stable multitemporal acquisition in
the areas under investigation.