Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) systems are increasingly seen as an attractive low-cost alternative or supplement to aerial and terrestrial photogrammetry due to their low cost, flexibility, availability and readiness for duty. In addition, UAVs can be operated in hazardous or temporarily inaccessible locations. The combination of photogrammetric aerial and terrestrial recording methods using a mini UAV (also known as "drone") opens abroad range of applications, such as surveillance and monitoring of the environment and infrastructural assets.In particular, these methods and techniques are of paramount interest for the documentation of cultural heritage sites and areas of natural importance, facing threats from natural deterioration and hazards. In order to verify the reliability of these technologies an UAV survey and a LIDAR survey have been carried out along about 1 km of coast in the Salento peninsula, near the towns of San Foca, Torre dell' Orso and SantAndrea ( Lecce, Southern Italy). This area is affected by serious environmental hazards due to the presence of dangerous rocky cliffs named "falesie". The UAV platform was equipped with a photogrammetric measurement system that allowed us to obtain a mobile mapping of the fractured fronts of dangerous rocky cliffs. UAV-images data have been processed using dedicated software (Agisoft Photoscan). The point clouds obtained from both the UAV and LIDAR surveys have been processed using Cloud Compare software, with the aim of testing the UAV results with respect to the LIDAR ones. The analysis were done using the C2C algorithm which provides good results in terms of Euclidian distances, highlighting differences between the 3D models obtained from both the survey techiques. The total error obtained was of centimeter-order that is a very satisfactory result.In the the 2nd study area, the opportunities of obtaining more detailed documentation of cultural goods throughout UAV survey have been investigated. The study area is an ancient Aragonese watchtower of the seventeenth century, located near the Abbey of San Vito in the countryside of Polignano a Mare (in the province of Bari, Southern Italy). The survey has been carried out with an "esacopter" equipped with a CANON EOS 550D. The image processing was carried out with Photogrammetric and Structure from Motion software (Agisoft PhotoScan) and, as a result, a cloud of 524.607 points with a 0.010096 m/pix resolution was obtained starting from 330 nadiral and inclined images. In order to verify the suitability of this technique we carried out also a terrestrial photogrammetric survey using three different photographic media, a reflex camera with integrated GPS, a compact digital camera and a camera of a smartphone. Three data set of image have been obtained and then compared. In conclusion, it is possible to say that the peculiarity of the RPAS photogrammetric survey allowed highlighting some peculiariar features of the tower, such as the presence of

The paper reports the results of a slope-atmosphere interaction analysis performed with referenceto geo-hydro-mechanical conditions typically observed on the Southern Apennines (Italy). The aim ofthe analysis is to gain some understanding in the characterisation of climatic variables employedto identify instability thresholds in clay slopes. A seepage analysis was undertaken first, showingthat Mediterranean climates can produce significant pore-pressure changes also at depths notusually considered to be affected by atmospheric conditions. Based on the results of the seepageanalysis, limit equilibrium analyses were carried out for a 5 m and a 20 m deep landslide, confirmingthat also deep movements in clay slopes can be related to slope-atmosphere interaction.The characterisation of climatic variables aimed at identifying instability thresholds is finallydiscussed based on the analyses reported in the paper. The results show that net rainfall cumulatedover 2 and 6 months represent suitable climatic variables for the 5 m and the 20 m deep landslide,respectively. These findings suggest that the stability of a clay slope, when referred to shallowmovements, is likely to depend on the rainfall infiltrating over a few weeks at least. When deepmovements are considered, the stability seems to depend more on the rainfall gradually infiltratingduring the most rainy seasons

The aim of this research is to identify fast and low-cost "Change Detection" techniques. This requirement stems from the need to operate in an efficient and timely manner, especially in case of natural disaster and battle against building abusiveness and, on the other hand, to environment monitoring: coastal erosion, subsidence phenomena, misuse of quarries, deforestation and desertification, etc.In this regard, this survey aims to assess the possibility of using DTM constructed by satellite images rather than DTM extracted through other techniques such as LIDAR and aerial photogrammetry. The results are very interesting and confirm the hypothesis: it is therefore possible to investigate territory in a more quickly and effective way. We have chosen, in line with the targets set, to focus the analysis on geographical areas particularly affected by environmental and anthropic criticalities, territorial morphological changes, building abusiveness, etc. The first study is located on an area near Fasano (BR) - Italy, that is a part of the Alta Murgia National Park. The second one is located in a mountainous area in the Basilicata, Italian region particularly affected by episodes of territorial transformation for both natural and anthropic causes

In relazione alle attività di ricerche condotte dall'Istituto di Ricerca per la Protezione Idrogeologica di Bari e nell'ambito di una Convenzione con il Comune di Troia (Fg) è stato effettuato uno studio sulle condizioni geologiche e gemorfologiche per l'individuazione e valutazione dei fattori di rischio in una parte dell'area pedemontana a ridosso dell'Appennino Dauno. Nel presente studio vengono descritte le fenomenologie presenti nel territorio del comune di Troia (FG), sulla base dei rilievi geologici e geomorfologici eseguiti, proponendo una possibile interpretazione della complessa fenomenologia di dissesto che interessa il centro abitato, da utilizzare come base per per la successiva valutazione del rischio.

Nel presente lavoro vengono esposti i risultati di alcuni rilievi effettuati con sistema UAV in duezone del territorio pugliese, affette da gravi problematiche ambientali. I rilievi sono stati eseguiti con un "esacottero" munito di fotocamera CANON EOS 550D e sistema di posizionamento satellitare GNSS. Nel primo caso il rilievo è stato effettuato su una torre di avvistamento aragonese in una zona costiera di grande interesse per il patrimonio artistico-culturale della regione Puglia, in località San Vito, Polignano a Mare (Bari). Successivamente, è stato eseguito il rilievo di un tratto di costa rocciosa del Salento (Puglia meridionale), affetta da gravi rischi ambientali dovuti al possibile crollo di elementi rocciosi, denominati "falesie". L'elevata accuratezza delle immagini ottenute dal rilievo ed elaborate con Agisoft Photoscan ha permesso di individuare elementi fondamentali per la caratterizzazione e l'analisi della stabilità di ciascun sito.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) are emerging as a key engineering tool for future environmental survey tasks. In particular, the UAV survey techniques allow for a more detailed depiction of the characteristics of the cultural heritage of which our country is so rich. UAV aerial imagery offers both timely (on demand) and more detailed (higher resolution) information than comparable satellite imagery. In the present study the opportunities of obtaining more detailed documentation of cultural goods throughout UAV survey have been investigated. This paper presents the results of UAV surveys carried out in three areas of Apulia territory of great environmental concern. The first study area is an ancient Aragonese watchtower of the seventeenth century, located in the countryside of Polignano a Mare (Bari, Southern Italy). The surveys have been carried out with an "esacopter" equipped with a CANON EOS 550D camera. UAV-images data were processed using dedicated software (Agisoft Photoscan) and as a result, starting from 330 nadiral and inclined images, a cloud of 524.607 points with a 0.0100 m/pix resolution was obtained. The tower's model was extracted from the whole point cloud using ESRI ArcGIS 10.3 software. This kind of survey allowed highlighting some peculiarities of the tower that would not have been detectable with a terrestrial survey. In the 2nd study area several survey techniques and methodologies (Total Station and GNSS receivers, LiDAR and UAV photogrammetric surveys) applied to a limestone quarry have been compared in order to describe accuracies, precisions, precautions, operative difficulties and costs of each one. For each method different algorithms have been used in order to build the respective Digital Terrain Models (DTM). This analysis showed that the obtained DTMs are almost perfectly comparable. Finally, an UAV survey has been carried out along about 1 km of coast in the Salento peninsula (Lecce, Southern Italy). This area is affected by serious environmental risks due to the presence of dangerous rocky cliffs. The UAV platform was equipped with a photogrammetric measurement system that allowed obtaining a mobile mapping of the fractured fronts of dangerous rocky cliffs. The environmental information has been arranged in an ArcGIS platform in order to assess the risk levels. The experiences of UAV surveys carried out in this area confirmed that for inaccessible locations of dangerous rocky bodies the UAV survey coupled with GIS methodology proves to be a key engineering tool for the management of environmental risks.

Lo studio ha per oggetto il rilievo di un'antica torre di avvistamento aragonese del XVII secolo, ubicata lungo la costa adriatica circa 3 km a Nord dell'abitato di Polignano a Mare, in località San Vito. La torre di San Vito si colloca nel sistema di torri di avvistamento, difesa e comunicazione distribuite lungo la costa adriatica. Il sito è molto interessante da un punto di vista archeologico: porto naturale sull'adriatico e statio (stazione di cambio) sulla via traiana fu sede, nei secoli, di fiorenti traffici ed attività commerciali. Grazie alla particolare posizione e alla facilità di collegamento con i paesi dell'entroterra, tra il V e il VII secolo qui si insediarono i monaci basiliani. Furono proprio i monaci seguaci di San Basilio, secondo la leggenda, ad accogliere le reliquie di San Vito giunte a Polignano con la principessa salernitana Fiorenza nell'anno 801. In questo luogo i monaci, per custodire le reliquie del Santo, iniziarono la costruzione dell'Abbazia e del suo sistema difensivo: le mura e all'interno di queste la torre masseria del XVI secolo. Successivamente, nel XVII secolo fecero innalzare una torre d'avvistamento esterna posta a difesa dell'Abbazia contro le incursioni dal mare. Su tale torre è stato eseguito un rilievo fotogrammetrico da drone a circa 70m di altezza, con una rete di controllo a terra di 15 GCP. Sono state elaborate circa 330 immagini sia nadirali che inclinate, ottenendo una nuvola di 524.607 punti con una risoluzione 0.010096 m/pix punti. Dall' intera nuvola di punti sono stati estratti il modello 3D della torre e le ortofoto delle facciate e della copertura. La particolarità di tale tecnica ha permesso di evidenziare elementi peculiari della torre difficilmente rilevabili con rilievo "a terra", data la inaccessibilità dei luoghi.

As stated in many issues, the climate a leading cause of triggering and evolution of mass movements. Differentlyfrom other triggering factors the climatic factors can be well defined for the past and forecasted in the short andmedium term. Therefore, the recognition of the climatic trends related to geomorphological and hydrogeologicalmodifications allows for a prevision of landslides and other impacts on human life.The Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) on Climate Change (IPCC) predicts that the global sea level will riseof 60 cm by the year 2100 in response to the warming of the oceans and melting of glaciers. This couldhave a significant impact on the evolution of the environment if we take into account that coastal areas houseapproximately 10% of the world population.This paper describes an example of how climate change, and all possible related effects, played a driving role onthe triggering and evolution of a huge landslide.The studied area is the coastal slope of the town of Vasto (Abruzzo, Central Italy) recently affected by numerouslandslide reactivations. The landslide body extends for 2 km2 from the crown zone (at about 150 m a.s.l.) towardsthe coastal line. The deep-seated gravitational deformations and large landslides with submarine foots observedon the Vasto coastline are typical of mass movements occurring along the Adriatic coast, in the Plio-Pleistocenesequences represented by clays, sands and conglomerates with continental deposits covers.This study shows that the historical reactivations of the landslide, as well as its scarp retrogression, are relatedto transients destabilizing factors such as rainfall or snow-melting whereas oldest and deeper mass movementswere caused by various eustatic fluctuations in sea level, starting from the emergence of the slope in the middlePleistocene, where the sub-aerial phase of the transgressive marine succession began.A paleo-morphologic reconstruction of the slope enabled to correlate the numerous instabilities over time to thefluctuations in the level of the Adriatic Sea from the Middle Pleistocene to the present.For a more complete study, it was necessary to reconstruct a "geological-evolutionary model of the slope"that could explain the current stratigraphic features and the actual landsliding framework. The evolutionarymodel has been useful to understand and explain how the variation in sea level due to climate changes and thesimultaneous lifting of the area conditioned the present morphology of the hillside, predisposing the slope to awidespread landsliding. The results of geological-evolutionary model of the slope were validated using a FiniteElements stress-strain analysis carried out by means of the FLAC 6.0 calculation code. The stress-strain numericalsimulations show that the first activation of the landslide Vasto would have taken about 200,000 years ago at arapid rising of sea level.In conclusion, the landslide mass currently observable reflects a phenom

Vengono analizzate le interazioni tra le caratteristiche geomeccaniche del corpo stradale ed le variazioni dei livelli piezometrici nei terreni di fondazione attraverso uno studio modellistico agli elementi finiti, finalizzato alla determinazione dell'andamento della piezometrica per differenti altezze di rilevato e differenti profondità della falda acquifera, in funzione delle cartteristiche di compressibilità dei terreni di sottofondo.

Nell'ambito del PRIN (Programmi di Ricerca di Interesse Nazionale 2007) è stata svolta una ricerca mutidisciplinare e multiscala sugli interventi volti al miglioramento e al recupero di alcuni spazi del sottosuolo urbano ed extraurbano. La Puglia è una delle regioni a più elevata densità di ipogei con alta valenza archeologica e storico- artistica, attualmente in stato di conservazione precario, per cui viene obliterata la lettura completa dell'insediamento stesso. Il patrimonio ipogeo, molto complesso e articolato, è basato su una pluralità di processi insediativi e culturali di epoche e connotazioni diverse, strettamente integrati nel tessuto edilizio attuale. I casi presi in esame sono quelli emblematici di Canosa di Puglia, Gravina di Puglia e Palagianello. Se opportunamente valorizzate e messe in relazione con il livello stradale, le aree del sottosuolo possono contribuire attivamente allo sviluppo di spazi urbani e favorire la trasformazione del territorio in un ben più vasto processo di controllo e rinnovamento della forma delpaesaggio mediterraneo.

The geomorphic processes in landscape evolution are commonly assumed deterministic, although their high variability in rates and time. As the stability analyses of slopes are concerned, the classical methods consider threshold values of the different elements (slope angle, friction angle, climatic conditions, hydrogeological conditions, seismicity) that condition the safety factors, but often widespread landscape instabilities occur when the threshold values are not exceeded. To analyze these phenomena we studied a model for defining an "average" pattern of landscape evolution starting from the single deterministic process. Many previous studies demonstrated the driving role of weathering and erosion processes in landslide evolution. Among these, the "instability principle of geomorphic equilibrium" (Scheidegger, 1983) stated the relevancy of exogenic processes (weathering, erosion, etc.) particularly in those places where preexisting micro topographic irregularities or lithological variations are recognizable.The present paper gives an example of the unstable growth of small perturbations from the initial conditions up to the landslide initiation, even if there were no measurable variations in external controls. In this analysis the geomaterials are considered as a weathering system mathematically depicted as an n-components nonlinear dynamical system. A hierarchical multiscale model of instability is applied. The model treats four spatial scales: 1) local regolith scale (weathering processes, in situ breakdown of geo-materials), 2) hill slope scale (allocation of weathered products: soil removal in solid form, via erosion and mass wasting, or in dissolved form via surface water flow), 3) landscape units (relationships between weathering and denudation), 4) broadest landscape scale (topographic and isostatic response to weathering-limited denudation, unloading or depositional loading). The landslide susceptibilityanalysis for the present study is located in the south of Italy, in the Apulian Tavoliere,in front of the Southern portion of Apennine Chain. We focus on the town of Troia (in the Foggia province) which is representative of a typical geomorphological situation of the Daunian Subapennine villages. The main outcropping rocks are made of silty clay sediments, well known as "Subapennine Clays", and superimposed clastic deposits of coarse-grained conglomerates. There, the landscape is characterized by low hills and intervening wide alluvial valleys. On the top of the flat ridges are located several old towns and the bordering slopes are affected by continuous geomorphological evolution governed by erosion and weathering. So, several landslides take place on the borders of the villages. To analyse the stability conditions of the area we considered a local scale weathering system mathematicallytreated as a 5-components nonlinear system. Applying the dynamical instability principle and solving thesystem throughout the first Routh-Hurwit

The new survey techniques allow for a more detailed depiction of the characteristics of the cultural heritage of which our country is so rich. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) are emerging as a key engineering tool for future environmental survey tasks. UAV aerial imagery offers both timely (on demand) and more detailed (higher resolution) information than comparable satellite imagery. In the present study the opportunities of obtaining more detailed documentation of cultural goods throughout UAV survey have been investigated. The survey was conducted on an ancient Aragonese watchtower of the seventeenth century, located near the Abbey of San Vito in the countryside of Polignano a Mare (in the province of Bari, Southern Italy) (Fig.1). The high resolution of the produced images, approximately 1 cm x pixels, allows to obtain all elements of both structural and qualitative information required for a conservative restoration project of the monument. The peculiarity of the transportation vehicle of the camera has also made it possible to detect the top surface of the roof covering of the building, normally not accessible, with the presence of a chimney and an access hatch, on which to intervene for the proper disposal of rainwater. The research refers to the metric characteristics, accuracy, level of detail, the particular crack patterns, etc., reachable by photogrammetric methods, with the help of dedicated software (PHOTOSCAN) comparable with the methodologies of Computer Vision.