Land monitoring through optical and radar remote sensing

The monitoring of land cover is recognized as a fundamental activity, especially in the European Union, to provide spatial data for the comprehensive assessment and mapping of ecosystem services, thus offering a helpful tool to support decision-making activities. In this context, the general objective of this research was the development of a new procedure of land cover mapping and updating that uses free data and free applications for extracting information on a large area with high frequency and exploiting the potentiality of both Optical and SAR time-series images. The methodology developed for land cover mapping has a spatial resolution of 10 meters for the entire national territory, chosen as the study area with the possibility of annual updating and an accuracy in line with that of the main products of the Copernicus Program. The methodology was satisfactory, reaching an accuracy of 83% in terms of overall accuracy, but with values reaching over 90% in the case of some specific classes. Soil consumption was used to map landslide susceptibility in the northern Toscana area to understand how to improve the accuracy of the susceptibility map using a new variable as input data.