Monica Pepe

Italian National Research Council | CNR · Institute for Electromagnetic Sensing of the Environment IREA

Hyperspectral (HS) satellites like PRISMA (PRecursore IperSpettrale della Missione Applicativa) offer remarkable capabilities, yet they are constrained by a relatively coarse spatial resolution, curbing their efficacy in those applications that require pinpoint accuracy. Here we propose a fusion process, aimed at the enhancement of PRISMA HS spatia...

Satellite remote sensing of aerosol is largely conducted at moderate or coarse spatial resolution around 1–10 km. Nevertheless, at urban areas with high human activity, aerosol can originate from complex emission sources and may also vary strongly in space. Therefore, aerosol characterization at fine spatial resolution is essential for air quality...

Challenge Non-photosynthetic vegetation (NPV), because of its key role in water, nutrient, and carbon cycling, is an essential variable to monitor in agroecosystems. Despite its importance, the literature about NPV quantification from satellite in rangeland systems, where NPV plays an important role for animal nutrition, is still limited. New gener...

Non-photosynthetic vegetation (NPV) plays a key role in soil conservation, which in turn is important in sustainable agriculture and carbon farming. For mapping NPV image spectroscopy proved to outperform multispectral sensors. PRISMA (PRecursore IperSpettrale della Missione Applicativa) is the forerunner of a new era of hyperspectral satellite mis...

Satellite image data deliver consistent and frequent information for crop yield estimation over large areas. Hyperspectral narrowbands are more sensitive spectrally to changes in crop growth than multispectral broadbands but few studies quantified the gains in the former over the later. The PRecursore IperSpettrale della Missione Applicativa (PRISM...

Due to the low efficiency of nitrogen fertilizers in flooded rice paddies, there is a rising demand for tools able to detect crop nitrogen status in space and time to allow farmers to use the technical novelties of precision agriculture to improve fertilizer management in extensive fields. This work sets up an operational approach to increase nitro...

This study introduces a first assessment of the capabilities of PRISMA (PRecursore IperSpettrale della Missione Applicativa)—the new hyperspectral satellite sensor of the Italian Space Agency (ASI)—for Non-Photosynthetic Vegetation (NPV) monitoring, a topic which is becoming very relevant in the field of sustainable agriculture, being an indicator...

This study presents a first assessment of the Top-Of-Atmosphere (TOA) radiances measured in the visible and near-infrared (VNIR) wavelengths from PRISMA (PRecursore IperSpettrale della Missione Applicativa), the new hyperspectral satellite sensor of the Italian Space Agency in orbit since March 2019. In particular, the radiometrically calibrated PR...

Lodging is a major yield-reducing factors in wheat, causing reductions up to 80%. Timely detection of lodging can reduce its impacts and support proper decisions regarding expected yield, crop price or its insurance. Since the incidence of lodging is heterogeneous within a field, very high-resolution remote sensing data can be viable for accurate a...

In this study we exploit UAV data for estimating Fractional Vegetation Cover (FVC) of maize crop at the early stages of the growing season. UAV survey with a MicaSense RedEdge multispectral sensor was carried out on July 13th, 2017 over a maize field in Italy; simultaneous RGB in situ pictures were collected to build a reference dataset of FVC over...

Rapid and quantitative assessment of crop lodging is important for understanding the causes of the phenomena, improving crop management, making better production and supporting loss estimates in general. Accurate information on the location and timing of crop lodging is valuable for farmers, agronomists, insurance loss adjusters, and policymakers....

Materials recycling is a key process to close the loop of materials in the direction of circular economy. However, the variability of waste and the high volatility of the price of recovered materials are posing serious challenges to the current rigid design of mechanical recycling systems. This is particularly true for Waste Electric and Electronic...

The Po Plain (Italy) is a complex mixture of urban and rural landscapes. Between Lombardy and Piedmont, the rural zone includes the largest rice crop area in Europe, accounting for 40% and 90% of the European and Italian rice production, respectively. The monitoring of this crop system is important by both environmental and economic points of view,...

Geospatial metadata are often encoded in formats that either are not aimed at efficient retrieval of resources or are plainly outdated. Particularly, the quantum leap represented by the Semantic Web did not induce so far a consistent, interlinked baseline in the geospatial domain. Datasets, scientific literature related to them, and ultimately the...

In the last decade, citizen science (CS) has seen a renewed interest from both traditional science and the lay public as testified by a wide number of initiatives, projects, and dedicated technological applications. One of the main reasons for this renewed interest lies in the fact that the ways in which citizen science projects are designed and ma...

The present short paper describes the functionalities of a desktop tool enabling non-expert users to develop downstream services for the periodic download and processing of data from Sentinel sources. Index Terms: downstream service, flooded area mapping, Sentinel data, spectral indicators.

The recognition of spatial patterns within agricultural fields, presenting similar yieldpotential areas, stable through time, is very important for optimizing agricultural practices. This studyproposes the evaluation of different clustering methodologies applied to multispectral satellite timeseries for retrieving temporally stable (constant) patte...

In this article, we propose an automatic procedure for classification of UAV imagery to map weed presence in rice paddies at early stages of the growing cycle. The objective was to produce a weed map (common weeds and cover crop remnants) to support variable rate technologies for site-specific weed management. A multi-spectral ortho-mosaic, derived...

Nitrogen fertilization of silage maize in Central Italy is typically carried out with two applications at early stages of crop development: 2 nd (V2) and 6 th (V6) leaf respectively. In such conditions, the crop has not yet fully covered the soil and proximal or remote sensing of the canopy is hindered by the strong soil background signal. There is...

Agricultural monitoring has greatly benefited from the increased availability of a wide variety of remote-sensed satellite imagery, ground-sensed data (e.g., weather station networks) and crop models, delivering a wealth of actionable information to stakeholders to better streamline and improve agricultural practices. Nevertheless, as the degree of...

Waste of electric and electronic equipment (WEEE) is the fastest-growing waste stream in Europe. The large amount of electric and electronic products introduced every year in the market makes WEEE disposal a relevant problem. On the other hand, the high abundance of key metals included in WEEE has increased the industrial interest in WEEE recycling...

The ERMES agromonitoring system for rice cultivations integrates EO data at different resolutions, crop models, and user-provided in situ data in a unified system, which drives two operational downstream services for rice monitoring. The first is aimed at providing information concerning the behavior of the current season at regional/rice district...

The rapid growth and development in different fields related to sensors has, together with the huge increase of devices due to the decrease of device costs, led to a shift from traditional monitoring, where the data collected is not subject to any management actions, to sensor/processing networks, where in the life cycle more stages are devoted to...

Metadata management is an essential enabling factor for geospatial assets because discovery, retrieval, and actual usage of the latter are tightly bound to the quality of these descriptions. Unfortunately, the multi-faceted landscape of metadata formats, requirements, and conventions makes it difficult to identify editing tools that can be easily t...

EDI is a general purpose, template-driven metadata editor for creating XML-based descriptions. Originally aimed at defining rich and standard metadata for geospatial resources, It can be easily customised in order to comply with a broad range of schemata and domains. EDI creates HTML5 [9] metadata forms with advanced assisted editing capabilities a...

Glaciers’ changes are an important indicator of global warming, and the interpretation of satellite images offers a good source of information for such a monitoring. It is important to select areas of interest for the detection of glaciers bodies and in particular to capture also the part covered with debris, which is an open issue in remote sensin...

Waste from Electric and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) represent the fastest growing waste stream in Europe. The large amount of high values material (i.e. key metals) in these End of Life products, increases the industrial interests in WEEE recycling. Despite the evident economical potentialities of this sector, the high products variability and comp...

In the geospatial realm, data annotation and discovery rely on a number of ad-hoc formats and protocols. These have been created to enable domain-specific use cases generalized search is not feasible for. Metadata are at the heart of the discovery process and nevertheless they are often neglected or encoded in formats that either are not aimed at e...

The need for continuous, accurate, and comprehensive environmental knowledge has led to an increase in sensor observation systems and networks. The Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) initiative has been promoted by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) to foster interoperability among sensor systems. The provision of metadata according to the prescribed Se...

The paper illustrates the potentials of geospatial data to access a historical digital atlas for landscape analysis and territorial government. The experience of a historical geo-portal, the "Atl@nte dei Catasti Storici," in the management of geo-referenced and non-geo-referenced maps-ancient cadastral and topographic maps of the Lombardy Region-ca...

Despite Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) activities are now extremely helpful in a number of scientific applications, researchers and decision makers oppose some resistance to the usage of volunteered contributions, due to quality issues. Several methods and workflows have been proposed to face quality issues in different VGI projects, usua...

The aims of this study were: (i) the mapping of asbestos cement roofs in an urban area; and (ii) the development of a spectral index related to the roof weathering status. Aerial images were collected through the Multispectral Infrared and Visible Imaging Spectrometer (MIVIS) sensor, which acquires data in 102 channels from the visible to the therm...

RITMARE is a Flagship Project by the Italian Ministero dell’Istruzione, dell’Università e della Ricerca (MIUR) and coordinated by the National Research Council (CNR). It aims at the interdisciplinary integration of national marine research. In pursuing a Linked Open Data (LOD) vocation, the RITMARE sub-project 7 is building the necessary domain-rel...

Initiatives that rely upon the contributions of volunteers to reach a specific goal are growing more and more with the success of Web 2.0–interactive applications. Also scientific projects are testing and exploiting volunteers' collaboration, but the quality of information obtained with this approach is often puzzling. This paper offers a rich over...

En los tiempos actuales, ante el aumento de la demanda de alimentos, el incremento del precio de ellos y la adopción de nuevas técnicas para la agricultura, es más importante la optimización de las explotaciones agrícolas. Ante este escenario, nace el proyecto Europeo ERMES (An Earth Observation Model based Rice Information Service, http://www.ERME...

SNOTEL hourly and daily data are a strategic information about snowpack dynamics in western United States. Hourly data are highly noisy due to, e.g., non-physical temperature-based fluctuations of the signal or gauge under-catch. Noise may hinder, among other factors, the correct evaluation of precipitation events or the measurement of SWE, hence t...

Understanding marine transport and the dispersion of tracers are crucial components of an effective strategy for protecting marine biodiversity and mitigating anthropogenic hazards. Single standalone observational sites are not effective for a long term and large scale (i.e. national or cross-border territories) strategy unless they are integrated...

Introduzione ed obiettivi: Per un efficiente monitoraggio dei sistemi colturali, risulta di fondamentale importanza disporre con tempestività di informazioni circa la tipologia delle colture seminate e le dinamiche colturali in atto. Gli agro-ecosistemi europei si caratterizzano per avere forte frammentazione dei singoli appezzamenti agricoli, ampi...

More than 100 years of systematic glacier monitoring in the Italian Alps have produced one of the longest and most valuable series of observations of this kind in the world. The collection is relevant not only for its value as historical archive, but also as an important reference for analyzing past trends and for modeling the future of the cryosph...

Hyperspectral remote sensing is recognized as a powerful tool for mineralogical mapping of exposed surfaces on Earth and planets, as well. It allows for more rigorous discrimination among materials than multispectral imaging. Nevertheless, the huge data volume that comes with single observations results in severe limitations to successful data expl...

Coastal radars provide information on the environmental state of oceans, namely maps of surface currents at time intervals of the order of one hour with spatial coverage of the order of several km, depending on the transmission frequency. The observations are of crucial importance for monitoring ports and ship tracks close to the coast, providing s...

The paper analyses the challenges and problems posed by the use of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) in citizen science and a proposal is formulated for assessing VGI quality based on a linguistic decision making approach so as to allow its feasible use for scientific purposes. VGI quality is represented by indicators at distinct levels of g...

RITMARE is a Flagship Project by the Italian Ministry of Research, coordinated by the National Research Council (CNR). It aims at the interdisciplinary integration of Italian marine research. Sub-project 7 shall create an interoperable infrastructure for the project, capable of interconnecting the whole community of researchers involved. It will al...

Nellórganizzazione dellÍnfrastruttura per Dati Spaziali (SDI) del Progetto Bandiera RITMARE, destinata a raccogliere i contributi delle diverse realta? di Ricerca coinvolte nel progetto, un ruolo centrale e? costituito dalla rappresentazione di Ricercatori e Istituti. Al fine di poter facilmente integrare questa rappresentazione con la restante inf...

StarterKit (SK) e? una suite software open che permette di erogare dati geografici e osservazioni da sensori, attraverso servizi web diversi che seguono gli standard OGC. SK permette di annotare le risorse con metadati conformi agli standard (INSPIRE, SensorML), arricchiti semanticamente.

We present a novel approach to the management of Spatial Data Infrastrutures that leverages semantics-aware context information to model the distinct aspects involved in the management of geospatial data. RDF-based schemata are employed for encoding information about the user community, the terminologies in use in a specific research domain, gazett...

Capacity building by data providers is a fundamental task in the creation of a decentralized Spatial Data Infrastructure. This challenge has been tackled in the RITMARE Flagship Project by providing the Starter Kit, a comprehensive set of domain-oriented software components that exposes standard services for the management of geospatial information...

European Alpine glaciology has a long tradition of studies and activities, in which researchers have often relied on the field work of some specialized volunteer operators. Despite the remarkable results of this cooperation, some problems in field data harmonization and in covering the whole range of monitored glaciers are still present. Moreover,...

Spectroradiometric field surveys, especially when addressed at heterogeneous targets and within a complex environmental context, require careful organization and structuring. This work focuses on a proposal of an operational workflow that holds together different aspects of in situ spectral data acquisition, from planning to data analysis, and is a...

The most common cause of carbonates formation on Earth is the chemical deposition from Ca-rich waters in sedimentary basins, mostly in shallow water. The lack of widespread exposure of carbonates on the Mars' surface in areas where geomorphological and sedimentological mapping confirms the presence of water for a long period of the Martian history,...

We compare the mineralogy of carbonates on Mars and terrestrial carbonatites using XRD and reflectance spectroscopy to unravel the origin of carbonates on Mars.

The current trend of area and volume reduction of the european alpine glaciers has led to a dramatic decline of these resources in recent decades, and striking phenomena such as morphological changes, glacier fragmentation and even extinction of glacial bodies are increasingly frequent. This trend makes even more urgent the need of systematic and s...

This contribution proposes an approach to model regional landslide susceptibility, based on a supervised learning technique that mines fuzzy emerging patterns on a set of classified data. In our approach the training set contains positive and negative examples of areas, (i.e., slope units), affected or not affected by landslides. The fuzzy emerging...

The present research is focused on the development and testing of a hyperspectral classifier aimed at preserving the informational content of hypercubes.

Snowmelt is an important component of the river discharge in mountain environments. In the past 40 years, the snowmelt dynamics has been mostly evaluated using degree‐day‐based models like the snowmelt runoff model (SRM). This model has no control on the volume of the melting snow, even if SRM includes as data input the snow‐covered area. This lack...

The lithologic composition and grain size di stribution of sediments in coastal areas are primary determinants of their inherent reflectance properties. Aim of this study is to characterize the spectral features of coastal sediments by integrating field spectral measures and airborne MI VIS hyperspectral imagery. The work is based on proximal sensi...

BOMBER (Bio-Optical Model Based tool for Estimating water quality and bottom properties from Remote sensing images) is a software package for simultaneous retrieval of the optical properties of water column and bottom from remotely sensed imagery, which makes use of bio-optical models for optically deep and optically shallow waters. Several menus a...

The paper illustrates the potentials of geospatial data and services to access historical digital atlas for landscape analysis and territorial government. The experience of a historical geo-portal, the ‘Atl@nte dei Catasti Storici', in the management of geo-referenced and non-geo-referenced maps - ancient cadastral and topographic maps of Lombardy...

CONTEXT OF THE RESEARCH This paper deals with the introduction of volunteer information in the workflow of data collection, monitoring of changes, and related alerts as regards the glacier environment realm in Italian Alps. Usually such topics are addressed within institutional frameworks by the use of tools and practices that merely belongs to sci...

The ENVISAT mission with a suite of high performance sensors offers some opportunities for mapping snow cover at regional and catchment scale. The geometric resolution of MERIS data and the spectral resolution of AATSR data are suitable for these purposes. A new approach, developed in the framework of the GLASNOWMAP project (ESA-DUP2) for monitorin...