Elena Belcore

Politecnico di Torino | polito · DIATI - Department of Environment, Land and Infrastructure Engineering

This article explores the application of Hölder exponent analysis for the identification and delineation of single tree crowns from very high-resolution (VHR) imagery captured by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). Most of the present individual tree crown detection (ITD) methods are based on canopy height models (CHM) and are very effective as far as...

Riparian habitats provide a series of ecological services vital for the balance of the environment, and are niches and resources for a wide variety of species. Monitoring riparian environments at the intra-habitat level is crucial for assessing and preserving their conservation status, although it is challenging due to their landscape complexity. U...

In recent years, numerous directives worldwide have addressed the conservation and restoration of riparian corridors, activities that rely on continuous vegetation mapping to understand its volumetric features and health status. Mapping riparian corridors requires not only fine‐scale resolution but also the coverage of relatively large areas. The u...

Monitoring the world’s areas that are more vulnerable to natural hazards has become crucial worldwide. In order to reduce disaster risk, effective tools and relevant land cover (LC) data are needed. This work aimed to generate a high-resolution LC map of flood-prone rural villages in southwest Niger using multispectral drone imagery. The LC was foc...

Forests play a central role in the management of the Earth’s climate. Airborne laser scanning (ALS) technologies facilitate the monitoring of large and impassable areas and can be used to monitor the 3D structure of forests. While the ALS-based forest measures have been studied in depth, 3D change detection in forests is still a subject of little a...

This study focuses on the development of a people-centred early warning system (EWS) against floods in the Sirba River basin between Niger and Burkina Faso. This densely populated area has witnessed an increase in extreme flooding events in recent years. Several flood forecasting systems in the Sahel exist, although there is no EWS that integrates...

The classification of ultra-high-resolution (UHR) imagery, characterized by spatial resolutions exceeding 10 cm, presents opportunities and challenges distinct from lower-resolution counterparts. Particularly, challenges are pronounced in some scenarios, such as mapping plant species in coastal environments, where similar vegetation responses and s...

In the last years, the diffusion of the Precise Point Positioning (PPP) technique has constantly increased thanks to the more precise and accurate results that it can reach. Until some years ago, this technique was limited by long measurement sessions to obtain good precisions (centimetre-level), using only one GNSS dual frequency receiver. Online...

Forests are vital for ecological, economic, and social reasons, and adopting sustainable forest management practices is necessary. While traditional forest monitoring techniques provide detailed data, they are time-consuming; conversely, geomatic techniques can provide more detailed data for forest resource management. This study aims to assess the...

The safety and usability of infrastructures such as bridges, roads, and buildings must be monitored throughout their useful life. Traditional inspection methods are time-consuming and expensive, and innovative solutions using LiDAR-based techniques have developed. This study presents a semi-automatic method for detecting deteriorations on structura...

The role of vegetation in supporting life on Earth is widely known. Nevertheless, the relevance of riparian corridors has been overlooked for a long time, leading to a dramatic reduction of vegetated buffers alongside them. Vegetation monitoring systems, including those for biomass estimation, are required to manage riparian corridors properly. Fie...

This work aims to test the effectiveness of artificial intelligence for correcting water refraction in shallow inland water using very high-resolution images collected by Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) and processed through a total FOSS workflow. The tests focus on using synthetic information extracted from the visible component of the electromagnet...

Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) imagery has enabled very high-resolution multispectral image acquisition. Detection of wet areas and classification of land cover based on these images using the Machine Learning (ML) algorithm named Random Forest (RF) is our main purpose in this paper. Very high-resolution UAS images have been used as inputs for a mach...

The health assessment of strategic infrastructures and bridges represents a critical variable for planning appropriate maintenance operations. The high costs and complexity of traditional periodical monitoring with elevating platforms have driven the search for more efficient and flexible methods. Indeed, recent years have seen the growing diffusio...

Bridges are among the most important structures of any road network. During their service life, they are subject to deterioration which may reduce their safety and functionality. The detection of bridge damage is necessary for proper maintenance activities. To date, assessing the health status of the bridge and all its elements is carried out by id...

Flood risk assessments in the Global South have increased since the adoption of the United Nations Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030. However, they often fail to meet disaster risk reduction needs at the local scale, because they typically consider only one hazard (fluvial or pluvial floods). Furthermore, hazard and exposure ar...

Ce rapport contient le Plan de réduction des risques d’inondation de Touré, village administratif de la commune rurale de Gothèye, région Tillabéri, Niger. Touré (4 065 habitants en 2012, 0,6 km2 de surface bâtie en 2018) est situé le long de la rivière Sirba, l’un des principaux affluents du fleuve Niger moyen. Le village est menacé par les inonda...

Ce rapport contient le plan de réduction des risques d’inondation de Larba Birno, village administratif de la commune rurale de Gothèye, région de Tillabéri, Niger. Larba Birno (4 713 habitants en 2012, 0,7 km2 de surface bâtie en 2018) est situé le long de la rivière Sirba, l’un des principaux affluents du fleuve Niger moyen. Le village est menacé...

This report contains the Flood Risk Reduction Plan for Larba Birno, an administrative village of the rural municipality of Gothèye, Tillabéri region, Niger. Larba Birno (4713 inhabitants in 2012, 0.7 km2 of built up area in 2018) is located along the Sirba River, one of the main tributaries of the middle Niger River. This rural settlement is threat...

In the past decades, technology-based agriculture, also known as Precision Agriculture (PA) or smart farming, has grown, developing new technologies and innovative tools to manage data for the whole agricultural processes. In this framework, geographic information, and spatial data and tools such as UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) and multispectral...

Land Cover (LC) plays a key role in many disciplines and its classification from optical imagery is one of the prevalent applications of remote sensing. Besides years of researches and innovation on LC, the classification of some areas of the World is still challenging due to environmental and climatic constraints, such as the one of the mountainou...

Gli ultimi anni hanno visto l’impiego sempre più frequente di UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) per la raccolta di dati e informazioni geospaziali. Alcune delle ragioni dietro la recente popolarità degli UAV sono le continue innovazioni tecnologiche e la possibilità di integrare diversi sensori in piattaforme a costi contenuti. La rapida diffusione di...

L’Atlas Cartographique représente les scenarios d’inondation calculés à travers la modélisation hydraulique du tronçon nigérien de la Rivière Sirba à partir de la limite burkinabé jusqu’à la confluence dans le Fleuve Niger.

Le Rapport décrit l'état d'avancement dans la mise en oeuvre d'un Système Local d'Alerte Précoce contre les Inondations de la Sirba. Cette étude a été réalisée dans le cadre du Projet ANADIA2.0 par une équipe de travail pluridisciplinaire. L'étude a été cofinancée par l'Agence Italienne pour la Coopération au Développement, le Istituto di Biometeor...

Identifying areas of the world, communities, and women and men that could be damaged by meteorological events (like droughts and floods) has been crucial for vulnerability studies in the last decade. Climate change may differently affect female‐ and male‐headed households, especially in rural areas of sub‐Saharan Africa, where they react in a diffe...

South of the Sahara flood vulnerability and risk assessments at local level rarely identify the exposed areas according to the probability of flooding, the actions in place, localize the exposed items. They are, therefore, of little use for local development, risk prevention and contingency planning. The aim of this article is to assess the flood r...

The technology of UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) is rapidly improving and UAV-integrated sensors have kept up with it, providing more efficient and effective solutions. One of the most sought-after characteristics of on-board sensors is the low costing associated to good quality of the collected data. This paper proposes a very low-cost multiband s...

In Sahelian countries, a vast number of people are still affected every year by flood despite the efforts to prevent or mitigate these catastrophic events. This phenomenon is exacerbated by the incessant population growth and the increase of extreme natural events. Hence, the development of flood management strategies such as flood hazard mapping a...

Temporary surface water bodies in sub-Saharan areas have important socio-cultural values, providing freshwater for population and many agro-pastoral services. Nevertheless, they can be the perfect habitat for insects and pests, thus endangering human health. Moreover, temporary water bodies can cover vast areas of cities and villages hindering the...

Updating of the rating curves and of the historical series of Garbey Kourou

This research project aims to compare and evaluate different surveymethods for the data collection targeted to the characterization of a rockfall protection forest. The types of survey analyzed are: i) a traditional forest survey; ii) a mobile laser scannersurvey; and (iii) a UAV photogrammetric survey.The results show how the examined remote sensi...

In this contribution a comparison between TLS (Terrestrial Laser Scanner) and HMLS (Hand-held Mobile Laser Scanner) data for 3D forest modelling is presented

It is widely recognized that THE PRESENCE OF FOREST CAN REDUCE RUNOUT DISTANCES OF ROCKFALL, but the quantification of this reduction is still an issue. Numerical deterministic ROCKFALL SIMULATION MODELS may give interesting results in this field. However, the validation of these models is mandatory to significant achievements. VALIDATION can be pe...

This poster has been presented by Elena Belcore

Goal of the vulnerability research of the last years is to evaluate which community, region, or nation is more vulnerable in terms of its sensitive to damaging effects of extreme meteorological events like floods or droughts. Ethiopia is a country where it is possible to find the described conditions. Aim of this work was to develop an integrated s...