Illegal dumping is one of the major issues to be addressed by public managers in both developed and developing countries. The adequate tackling and enforcement of such unlawful activities require continuous territory monitoring, the lack of which is the principal cause of the failure of traditional systems based on patrolling, eventually triggered by sparse crowdsourced data. This work proposes the digitalization of the entire illegal waste management monitoring process through an innovative decision support system based on multiscale remote sensing data. These data enable the assessment of the risk level of specific areas, thus determining inspection priorities in line with the available patrolling resources. The proposed methodology provides a tool to assess the impact of diverse monitoring system parameters on overall the performance in light of the expected operating costs and to understand whether remote sensing can help a better management of illegal waste in a specific operational scenario, thus helping in the determination of the best cost–benefit trade-off. Simulation results over a demonstration scenario, based on realistic dumping/restoration dynamics and the typical performance of satellite detection systems, show that the adoption of remote sensing technologies in the monitoring process can increase the restoration capacity by about 10% compared to traditional patrolling.

This paper presents an innovative approach for detecting illegal microdumps using very high-resolution optical satellite imagery, addressing a significant environmental monitoring challenge in Campania, Italy. Due to the regional vulnerability to illegal dumping, exacerbated by the waste management crisis, there is a pressing need for enhanced surveillance and accurate identification of microdump locations. This paper uses deep learning techniques to introduce an effective technology for detecting microdumps in high-resolution optical satellite images from Pleiades and GeoEye-1 satellites in an end-to-end solution, from images to detection. Its primary aim is to preliminarily assess dumping sites within specific target areas of interest (patrolling cells) for subsequent on-ground confirmation and characterization. The proposed system comprises two neural networks: the first, based on RetinaNet, identifies regions containing microdumps, while the second, utilizing InceptionV3, enhances the detection through pixel-wise classification. A fusion rule is then applied to combine the decisions of these networks. This technology addresses an environmental issue and is part of a progressive monitoring process. Validation was performed through a significant case study focusing on an extensive area between Naples and Caserta in the Campania region in Italy, particularly affected by illegal microdumps. A model was trained and validated using the pansharpened version of Pleiades multispectral images. This model exhibits potential for detecting microdumps in images from other satellite missions, as confirmed by validating it with GeoEye-1 imagery without further fine-tuning or training. The performance of the proposed detection system, evaluated for the reference application, achieves a detection rate of approximately 90% and a false discovery rate of about 40%. Notably, this is attained using a fully automatic processing chain without geospatial integration with additional information sources. In conclusion, despite satellite images having limited ground sampling distance and subsequent lower accuracy of image understanding algorithms, they remain suitable for environmental monitoring applications from an end-user perspective.

Persistent environmental contaminants pose a substantial threat to agricultural ecosystems, necessitating robust methodologies for evaluation and mitigation of their effects. This study establishes a direct correlation between environmental impact assessment and sustainable agricultural management, showing the feasibility of using multi-scale bioindication and remote sensing technology to effectively monitor the impact of soil pollution in agricultural ecosystems. The key values of this research lie in the ability of the described approach to integrate advanced proximal/remote sensing and in situ analyses to assess the effects of soil contamination on bioindicators, providing a comprehensive framework for evaluating environmental stressors. The proposed methodology was tested on maize (Zea mays L.) and employs unmanned aerial vehicle-based multi/hyperspectral and thermal imaging to detect vegetation stress indicators such as normalized difference vegetation index and thermal anomalies. The interdisciplinary approach adopted in this research significantly enhances the value of the study by not only focusing on isolated results but also validating the entire methodological workflow. This cross-disciplinary integration ensures that the workflow retains its relevance across various environmental scenarios, enriching the results’ applicability and providing a robust framework for ongoing studies. The research objective of this work was achieved through experimental tests on soils contaminated with heavy metals and organic pollutants exceeding regulatory thresholds that revealed distinct spectral and thermal signatures, demonstrating the efficacy of integrated sensing for detailed environmental assessment. The findings underscore the role of bioindicators as pivotal tools for bridging environmental monitoring and sustainability by providing actionable insights into pollutant impacts and their cascading effects on ecosystems and human health. By equipping stakeholders with precise contamination detection tools, this study aims to provide a methodological approach to expand environmental impact assessment frameworks, supporting sustainable decision-making and risk management. These methodologies contribute to aligning agricultural practices with broader sustainability objectives, ensuring resilient food systems and ecosystem health.

In this work we propose a modified version of the BM3D algorithm recently introduced by Dabov et al. for the denoising of images corrupted by additive white Gaussian noise. The original technique performs a multipoint filtering, where the nonlocal approach is combined with the wavelet shrinkage of a 3D cube composed by similar patches collected by means of block-matching. Our improvement concerns the thresholding of wavelet coefficients, which are subject to a different shrinkage depending on their level of sparsity. The modified algorithm is more robust with respect to block matching errors, especially when noise is high, as proved by experimental results on a large set of natural images.

The lifting scheme represents an easy way of implementing the wavelet transform and of constructing new content-adapted transforms. However, the adaptive version of lifting schemes can result in strongly non-isometric transforms. This can be a major limitation, since all most successful coding techniques rely on the distortion estimation in the transform domain. In this paper we focus on the problem of evaluating the reconstruction distortion (due to quantization noise) in the wavelet domain when a non-isometric adaptive-prediction lifting scheme is used. The problem arises since these transforms are nonlinear, and so common techniques for distortion evaluation cannot be used in this case. We circumvent the difficulty by computing an equivalent time-varying linear filter, for which it is possible to generalize the distortion computation technique. In addition to the theoretical formulation of the distortion estimation, in this paper we provide experimental results proving the reliability of this estimation, and the consequent improvement of RD performance, thanks to a more effective resource allocation which can be performed in the transform domain.

This narrative review examines how plant bioindication can be integrated with remote sensing to support the preliminary screening of soil contamination, framed as an environmental situational awareness problem addressed through multi-scale imagery and field validation. Seven case studies—illegal waste deposits, pipeline leaks, landfill impacts, industrial areas, agrochemical drift, oil-spills in coastal wetlands, and acid mine drainage—were selected based on joint documentation of a contamination source or exposure condition, a measurable plant response, and a remotely detected signal related to vegetation stress. This synthesis clarifies how vegetation response can serve as a proxy for large-scale contamination screening. A common contamination–vegetation–remote sensing logic emerges across the cases examined, linking contamination drivers and exposure pathways to canopy responses detectable as spectral, thermal, spatial, or temporal anomalies. Recurring spatial patterns of vegetation anomalies are identified as first-order interpretive cues rather than diagnostic signatures. Vegetation stress responses lack spectral specificity, making spectral equifinality the primary operational challenge for vegetation-based biomonitoring. Future workflows should integrate spectral, spatial, temporal, multi-sensor, and ancillary data validated against ground-truth. Future research should expand the evidence base through formal literature searches, multi-site validation, standardized protocols, and infrastructures integrating plant phenotyping and remote sensing to support quantitatively validated screening approaches.