Geomatics, Natural Hazards and Risk

Urbanization processes can be seen as sequences of land-use changes, mainly consisting of “land take” for residential, commercial, industrial, and transportation purposes to enable the concentration of human populations into discrete areas. Processes like peri-urbanization, in which rural societies adopt urban livelihoods and urban populations adopt rural practices imply that the boundaries between rural and urban areas are not always clear-cut. The existence of intermediate settlements, where the functions overlap and people coexist (common geography, economy, culture, etc) requires a rural-urban continuum approach to the promotion of sustainable development, which recognizes the interactions and interdependencies between different types of settlements and the need of policies tailored to specific settlement types and their location along this rural-urban continuum.

Within this framework, the use of traditional and new remote sensing tools can promote land system sciences through new knowledge finding and data mining approaches. In particular, they can serve as the basis for land use planning, the design of infrastructure, and the development of construction standards and practices. Furthermore, GIS databases play a vital role in monitoring exposure across diverse scales, formats, and levels of detail supporting risk assessment and planning. Monitoring urbanization and understanding the socio-environmental complexity of its impacts is essential to acknowledge the involved dynamic processes, possibly linking distant locations through a continuum of land systems (urban teleconnection). Integrating land and urban processes into a unified framework offers a comprehensive approach for developing effective strategies to ensure urban sustainability, especially in the context of Climate Change.

Scientists, policy-makers, and land managers need to improve understanding of exposed assets to anticipate the emerging climatic impacts on communities, covering the basics of natural hazard risk with a focus on fusing data from multiple datasets expressly for the purposes of risk assessment.

The Article Collection is intended as a means of disseminating and sharing the results of studies supporting urban land system science. It aims to host new findings about biophysical, social and economic aspects of urban land systems and the use of multi-source remote sensing to fill knowledge and policy gaps in the management of urban complexity. We will also present examples applying the techniques to applications related to flood risk assessment, climate adaptation, and earthquake modeling.

All manuscripts submitted to this Article Collection will undergo a full peer-review; the Guest Advisors for this collection will not be handling manuscripts. Please review the journal scope and author submission instructions prior to submitting a manuscript.

The deadline for submitting manuscripts is 31 December 2024

Please contact Alex Johnson at [email protected] with any queries regarding this Article Collection.

Article Collection Guest Advisors

Dr Rosa Coluzzi is a Researcher at Institute of Methodologies for Environmental Analysis of the National Research Council (CNR-IMAA), Italy. Her research predominantly focuses on the study of landscape patterns and the characterization of phenomena and/or processes of the earth's surface. Her main work has been done in the processing of multisensor and multitemporal optical data (satellite and aerial), production of land-cover cartography and measures of ecological parameters from remote sensors. She has also been involved in the analysis of forest fire hazards, landscape changes (soil and water), droughts from long time series of satellite images and in situ and satellite integration data studies.

Dr Ioannis Vardopoulos is a Research Associate at Harokopio University of Athens, Greece, He studied civil engineering, and completed his postgraduate studies first in environmental management and conservation and later in sustainable development with honors distinction. Holding a doctorate in applied urban sustainability, he conducts high-quality research towards addressing key concerns of the contemporary build environment through principles of applied sustainability. His research interests include a wide range of urban sustainability aspects.

Dr Maria Lanfredi is a Researcher at the Institute of Methodologies for Environmental Analysis of the Italian National Research Council (CNR). Head of the IMAA LSD&D (Land Surface Dynamics & Degradation) laboratory. Her research activity mainly focuses on the development of methodologies for the analysis of Earth Observation data in the study of land cover dynamics and its interactions with the environment in a changing climate. Her expertise includes: stochastic systems, time series analysis; numerical analysis, image analysis, multiresolution analysis, machine learning methods, data mining, and satellite multi-spectral remote sensing.

Dr Vito Imbrenda graduated in Environmental Engineering (2003), he obtained a PhD in Environmental Engineering from the University of Basilicata (2012). Since 2018 he has been a researcher at the Institute of Methodologies for Environmental Analysis of the National Research Council of Italy (CNR-IMAA). His activities focus on the study of complex phenomena involving land systems (land degradation, urban sprawl, climate change impacts, etc.) with the potential socio-economic implications through landscape ecology tools and earth observation techniques.

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