Use of Sentinel-3 OLCI Images and Machine Learning to Assess the Ecological Quality of Italian Coastal Waters.

Understanding and monitoring the ecological quality of coastal waters is crucial for preserving marine ecosystems. Eutrophication is one of the major problems affecting the ecological state of coastal marine waters. For this reason, the control of the trophic conditions of aquatic ecosystems is needed for the evaluation of their ecological quality.

Assessment of forest net primary production through the elaboration of multisource ground and remote sensing data.

This paper builds on previous work by our research group which demonstrated the applicability of a parametric model, Modified C-Fix, for the monitoring of Mediterranean forests. Specifically, the model is capable of combining ground and remote sensing data to estimate forest gross primary production (GPP) on various spatial and temporal scales. Modified C-Fix is currently applied to all Italian forest areas using a previously produced data set of meteorological data and NDVI imagery descriptive of a ten-year period (1999-2008).

Use of ecosystem information to improve soil organic carbon mapping of a Mediterranean island.

Detailed maps of soil C are needed to guide sustainable soil uses and management decisions. The quality of soil C maps of Italian Mediterranean areas may be improved and the sampling density reduced using secondary data related to the nature of the ecosystem. The current study was conducted to determine: (i) the improvements obtainable in mapping soil C over a Mediterranean island by using ecosystem features and (ii) the effect of different sampling densities on the map accuracy.