A smart monitoring to manage and safeguard the vegetation component of historic gardens from climate change: The EFFORT approach

An historic garden, identified by artistic and predominant plant components, provides, as any other green urban area, important services (e.g. recreational, water regulation, biodiversity, pollution removal) with additional values (e.g. monumental, aesthetic, historical, economic). However, the current state of conservation of the plant component of some historic gardens is often precarious, because historic gardens were created in a climate that is now historic itself. Specifically, in the recent decades, the natural senescence processes of the plant component have been accentuated by various types of biotic and abiotic stressors, often related to climatic extreme events associated with global warming (e.g. prolonged periods of drought, waterlogging and intense wind storms) mainly affecting old specimens. Such process is becoming a critical issue for those entities involved in the management and conservation of these heritages, often causing safety problems for humans and architectural artefacts. To support the conservation, restoration, and management of those places, ad hoc guidelines for managers to face environmental changes are thus needed. On this basis, a smart monitoring approach, developed within EFFORT project (co-funded by Tuscany Region and Cassa di Risparmio di Firenze, Italy), is hereby presented so as to combine innovative technologies to support the multidisciplinary segments of two historical gardens, namely: the Medicean gardens of Villa di Castello and Villa la Petraia, in Florence, Italy. The monitoring, started in March 2020, is applied both at garden and single plant level by using remote sensing (high resolution cameras, Sentinel2 images and LIDAR), image analysis techniques and ecophysiological sensors. Preliminary results, demonstrating to be effective in monitoring the vegetation and architectural segments of the garden at high spatial and temporal scale, will be used to establish guidelines and measures to drive gardens in a process of adaptation to the new climatic conditions. Finally, the 4.Urban areas: Assessing, predicting and managing the current and future risk “Accelerating Climate Action: A just Transition in a Post-Covid Era” Book of Abstracts 48 assessment of effectiveness of the smart monitoring approach will leverage the possibility of its replicability in any historic garden as well as the development of guidelines for garden managers to face environmental changes.