Remote sensing in the fight against environmental crimes: The case study of the cattle-breeding facilities in southern Italy

Abstract

Enforcement of environmental regulation is a persistent challenge and timely detection of the violations is key to holding the violators accountable. The use of remote sensing data is becoming an effective practice in the fight against environmental crimes. In this work, a novel and effective approach for the detection of potentially hazardous cattle-breeding facilities, exploiting both synthetic aperture radar and optical multispectral data together with geospatial analyses in the geographic information system (GIS) environment, is proposed. Experiments on data available for the area of Caserta (Southern Italy), show that the proposed technique provides very high detection capability, up to 90%, with a acceptable false alarm rate, becoming a useful tool in the hand of agencies engaged in the protection of territory.