As result of the “Global Land Cover Mapping at Finer Resolution” project led by National Geomatics Center of China (NGCC), one of the first global land cover datasets at 30-meters resolution (GlobeLand30) has been produced for the years 2000 and 2010. The first comprehensive accuracy assessment at a national level of these data (excluding some comparisons in China) has been performed on the Italian area by means of a benchmarking with the more detailed land cover datasets available for some Italian regions. The accuracy evaluation was based on the cell-by-cell comparison between Italian maps and the GlobeLand30 in order to obtain the confusion matrix and its derived statistics (overall accuracy, allocation and quantity disagreements, user and producer accuracy), which help to understand the classification quality. This paper illustrates the adopted methodology and procedures for assessing GlobeLand30 and reports the obtained statistics. The analysis has been performed in eight regions across Italy and shows very good results: the comparison of the datasets according to the first level of Corine Land Cover nomenclature highlights overall accuracy values generally higher than 80%.

Climate issues are nowadays one of the most pressing societal challenges, with cities being identified among the landmarks for climate change. This study investigates the effect of urban land cover composition on a relevant climate-related variable, i.e., the air temperature. The analysis exploits different big geo-data sources, namely high-resolution satellite imagery and in-situ air temperature observations, using the city of Milan (Northern Italy) as a case study. Satellite imagery from the Landsat 8, Sentinel-2, and RapidEye missions are used to derive Local Climate Zone (LCZ) maps depicting land cover compositions across the study area. Correlation tests are run to investigate and measure the influence of land cover composition on air temperature. Results show an underlying connection between the two variables by detecting an average temperature offset of about 1.5 ${}^{\circ }$ C between heavily urbanized and vegetated urban areas. The approach looks promising in investigating urban climate at a local scale and explaining effects through maps and exploratory graphs, which are valuable tools for urban planners to implement climate change mitigation strategies. The availability of worldwide coverage datasets, as well as the exclusive use of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), provide the analysis with a potential to be empowered, replicated, and improved.

Dunes and sand sheets motion natural hazard affect many desertic areas worldwide and require careful assessment to develop effective mitigation plans to protect populated sites, infrastructure, and human activities. The study explores the suitability of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) coherent methods to detect desert area instabilities and estimate sand accumulations displacements. The SAR methods have been applied to long time series of images provided by Sentinel-1. Moreover, the research introduces a novel robust index, named Temporal Stability Index, able to characterize the percentage of stability of a target with time. The work reports the experiments performed on the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Egypt desertic areas and proves the usefulness of SAR coherent methods to support sand mitigation measures.