Samuele De Petris

Università degli Studi di Torino | UNITO · Department of Agricultural, Forest and Food Sciences

Greening is a subsidy provided by the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), related to mowing and designed to protect environment. National or regional paying agencies (PP) monitor and verify compliance of farmers’ declarations with CAP rules. In this work, an operational procedure is proposed aimed at supporting PPs in detecting, mapping and quantifyi...

Forest height is a fundamental parameter in forestry. SAR interferometry (InSAR) has been widely used to retrieve digital elevation models (DEM), which are designed to provide a continuous representation of Earth topography, including forests. The ordinary InSAR framework requires a further phase unwrapping step in order to recover unambiguously th...

The cross-disciplinary approach provided in this work has been applied on a case study located in the province of Alessandria, within the ‘cultural landscape’ of Lower Monferrato, (Piemonte, NW Italy). From a methodological point of view, a comparison was achieved between the native design of the garden (dated back to the end of the sixties) and th...

The forestry sector has been significantly affected by the recent advances in geomatics. Photogrammetric aerial acquisitions provide full coverage of forests, making possible a wall-to-wall mapping of the main forestry key variables, such as tree height and tree density, needed for forest planning and management purposes. This work summarizes the r...

Approaches based on multitemporal analysis of optical-retrieved vegetation index time series were successfully applied to describe forest disturbances like forest fires; conversely, only few works make use of multitemporal Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data. In this work, a multi-temporal approach based on Sentinel-1 data (S1) is proposed based on...

After an extreme rainy event agricultural fields can be submerged by water. Stagnant water can be generated by river’ flooding or by soil saturation causing different damage level to crops. In this work, the flood event occurred on 3rd October 2020 in NW Italy along the Sesia river was assessed with special concern about damages affecting rice crop...

Forest height is a fundamental parameter in forestry. Tree height is widely used to assess a site’s productivity both in forest ecology research and forest management. Thus, a precise height measure represents a necessary step for the estimation of carbon storage at the local, national, and global scales. In this context, error in height measuremen...

TELECER project is supported through Rural Development Programme regional action of EU CAP and is aimed at providing Precision Agriculture–devoted services for cereals monitoring in the Piemonte Region (NW-Italy) context. In this work authors explored some general and preliminary issues mainly aimed at demonstrating and formalizing those evident re...

Farmers are supported by European Union (EU) through contributions related to the common agricultural policy (CAP). To obtain grants, farmers have to apply every year according to the national/regional procedure that, presently, relies on the Geo-Spatial Aid Application (GSAA). To ensure the properness of applications, national/regional payment age...

Satellite remote sensing has long been used to monitor forest harvesting with accuracies appropriate for practical mapping across a wide range of forest types by using different sensors. Unfortunately, in Italy, most of the cuts take place in winter where the cloud cover is very high, making it impossible an early detection by optical data. In this...

Forest height is a key parameter in forestry. SAR interferometry (InSAR) techniques have been extensively adopted to retrieve digital elevation models (DEM) to give a representation of the continuous variation of the Earth’s topography, including forests. Unfortunately, InSAR has been proven to fail over vegetation due to low coherence values; ther...

Greening is a Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) subsidy that ensures that all EU farmers receiving income support produce climate and environmental benefits as part of their farming activities. To receive greening support, it is mandatory for the farmer to carry out three agricultural practices that are considered environmentally and climate friendl...

Flood-damages on crops are related to several factors concerning both flood event and crops characteristics. In particular, flooded area size and water level are critical parameters while assessing yield loss and damages related to agricultural infrastructure and irrigation systems. With reference to the Sesia river (North-Western Italy) flood, occ...

Climate change is a well-known issue in both the scientific community and public opinion that, in the long term, could increase frequency and intensity of extreme weather events. Several models have been developed to estimate damages caused to crops by flooding, but most of them assume that crops are stable and unchanged over time.Conversely, yearl...

In the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, agriculture represents the most important economic sector, and land control can be considered a perpetual source of conflict. Knowledge of the existing production system distribution is fundamental for both informing national land tenure reforms and guiding more effective agricultural development interve...

Operational services based on SAR data from satellite missions are showing to have the potentialities of becoming a real scenario; nevertheless, the complexity of data pre-processing remains one of the main reasons for its slow uptake by a wider user community. Google Earth Engine (GEE) web-based platform allows an immediate access to SAR imagery (...

Precision agriculture involves the integration of new technologies including Geographic Information Systems (GIS), Global Navigation Satellites Systems (GNSS) and Remote Sensing (RS) platforms and sensors to allow farmers to maximize the cost-benefit ratio, rather than using the traditional whole-field approach. MAIA S2 is a recent multispectral ae...

The qualitative and quantitative knowledge of forestry stands is a fundamental requirement for their management and exploitation planning. Traditional field measurements, based on plots, are certainly accurate, but time-consuming and expensive; moreover, it cannot provide a wall-to-wall estimate of measures over large areas. Even though they are es...

Monitoring large-scale flood damage can be complicated and costly. Damages caused by floods affect also the agricultural sector. Permanence, height and quantity of stagnant water can significantly influence crop yield. Many studies exploit satellite data to map flooded areas, but only a few are focused on the timing of water persistence. This work...

Rising temperature, rainfall, and wind regime changes, increasing of frequency and intensity of extreme events are only some of the effects of climate change affecting the agro-forestry sector. Earth Observation data from satellite missions (often available for free) can certainly support analysis of climate change effects on vegetation, making pos...

Climate change increases extreme whether events such as floods, hailstorms, or storms, which can affect agriculture, causing damages and economic loss within the agro-food sector. Optical remote sensing data have been successfully used in damage detections. Cloud conditions limit their potential, especially while monitoring floods or storms that ar...

Green spaces may benefit human health mainly by mitigating noise and air pollution, promoting physical or social activities and improving mental health. Based on the influence that green space exposure seems to exert on Public Health and using a multidisciplinary approach, we investigated, the association between oxidative stress (OS) and green exp...

Farmers that intend to access Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) contributions must submit an application to the territorially competent Paying Agencies (PA). Agencies are called to verify consistency of CAP contributions requirements through ground campaigns. Recently, EU regulation (N. 746/2018) proposed an alternative methodology to control CAP ap...

Detection and monitoring of vigour decline are certainly useful for forest managers to support future interventions. In this work a new index, from Sentinel-2 retrieved NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) time series, is proposed, hereafter called 'normal-ized Vegetation Vigour Index (nVVI)', which is specifically designed to quantify and...

Tree stability evaluation is an important issue with great practical implications. In the recent years, tree potential to cause harm has been increasing in consequence of climate change effects, mainly related to windstorms and tree diseases that represent the main tree failure causes. A tree owner has a duty of safety, imposed by civil and penal l...

This study evaluated the effectiveness of Sentinel-2 (S2) as a tool for early detection and estimation of forest harvesting in the Piemonte Region, which can be used by the regional forest administration. The priority was the detection, at the regional scale, of annual forest cover changes with the following goals: i) mapping of irregular (in respe...

Tree height (H) survey is a fundamental step in forest mensuration. The error affecting tree height measure, necessarily influences the correspondent tree estimates. The remotely survey of vegetation using PHODAR (PHOtogrammetric Detection And Ranging) or LiDAR (Light Detection And Ranging) techniques generates very high-density point clouds, that...

In October 2017, a large wildfire occurred in the Susa valley (Italian Western Alps) affecting wide areas of mixed forests (Pinus sylvetris L.; Fagus sylvatica L., Quercus pubescens Willd.) with a spot pattern. Few days after the event an aerial survey operated by an RGB camera Sony ILCE-7RM2-a7R II was done with the aim of testing a digital photog...

Hail is one of the risks that most frightens farmers and one of the few currently insured climatic-related phenomena. In the last years, a significant increase occurred of adverse events affecting crops, highlighting that ordinary strategies of insurance companies should migrate to a more dynamic management. In this work a prototype of service base...

Climate change is today one of the biggest issues for farmers. The increasing number of natural disasters and change of seasonal trends is making insurance companies more interested in new technologies that can somehow support them in quantifying and mapping risks. Remotely sensed data, with special focus on free ones, can certainly provide the mos...

Oil palm is a perennial tree that well fits the humid tropical climate; fresh fruit bunchesare the palm raw fruit for oil mills. Palm oil is the world highest yielding oil crop determining that palms are extensively planted in South-East Asia, especially in Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia where plantations have been spreading in response to the i...