The Geores Project: Geospatial Application in Support of Environmental Sustainability and Resilience to Climate Changes in Urban Areas

The GEORES project is funded by the Italian Space Agency (ASI) and aims to develop a geospatial application meant to improve environmental sustainability and resilience to climate changes in urban areas, based on the synergistic use of the most advanced Earth Observation (EO) technologies, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and eXplainable AI (XAI). GEORES is organized into four main modules to support management of the main risks associated with land degradation: (1) Sediment Connectivity; (2) Land Displacement; (3) Urban Floods; (4) Urban Wildfires. For each module, EO data, calculation models and algorithms are integrated to identify "hot-spots" of urban and peri-urban territory at high risk from the point of view of land degradation caused by phenomena of hydrogeological instability, sediment flow or vegetation fires. The extracted information is expressed with specific indicators ("geo-analytics") calculated dynamically and automatically. The demonstration is undertaken in the Metropolitan City of Bari and Gargano Promontory, Apulia Region, southern Italy, and foresees the engagement of final users (i.e. Regional Civil Protection and Municipality of Bari).