Search

Large infrastructure building like the Florence Railway Station designed for high-speed rails requires a proper management of the huge quantity of waste originating from excavation activities. Such waste amounts require large areas for disposals, making abandoned areas or exhausted quarries and mines ideal sites for hosting the excavated wastes.A rectangular area of 500×70m delimiting the railway station has been excavated in two steps causing the removal of a 10m-thick soil layer per step: excavated earth and rocks would then be used for the environmental restoration of an area of 400×350m located near a former exhausted lignite quarry) in the proximity of the Santa Barbara village near Cavriglia (Arezzo).The Tuscan Regional Environmental Agency (ARPAT) have been involved in monitoring both the terrain transportation and disposals’ operations according to the approved management plan: the Environmental Regional Information System Office (SIRA) was asked to evaluate volume balancing between all the waste management cycle, with included: (a) waste extraction from railway station site building, and (b) waste disposal final destination (exhausted Santa Barbara lignite quarry).Terrestrial Laser Scanner (TLS), Simultaneous Localization and Mapping System (SLAM) systems and Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems (RPAS) surveys have been used to track earth and rocks excavation and disposal activities in the aforementioned sites: while RPAS systems cannot be used in underground site surveys, their usage must be recommended in open space surveys due to the ese of use if sub-centimetric precisions are not required.Multiple TLS scans alignment can result in a quite challenging task if automatic alignment software is not available, requiring manual rough alignment’s operations that can be very time consuming: two open-source solutions based on different algorithms have been evaluated.The selected survey technologies – RPAS, TLS, SLAM – have shown a great potential in earth and rocks monitoring: each technology has its own strengths and weakness, which can vary on the basis of both hardware and software technical progresses.

Complex extractive districts, such as the marble quarries in the Apuan Alps (northern Italy), require soil consumption monitoring over the years that could be achieved through high-resolution remotely sensed data. To derive 2D and 3D indicators with appropriate resolution for annual monitoring of high-resolution changes in soil consumption, aerial images, LiDAR acquisitions, satellite data, and Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems (RPAS) acquisitions were used. In particular, open-access Sentinel-2 multispectral satellite imagery with a spatial resolution of 10 m was used to assess cover changes (2D), and then refined by manual interpretation for 5 years (2016-2021). 3D changes were detected by comparing free aerial LiDAR data from 2009 and 2017, integrated with two stereo models obtained from Pléiades high-resolution satellite images from 2020 and 2022. 3D changes observed over the years by algebraic elevation comparison, performed in QGIS 3.x environment, highlight quarries characterized by intense mining activities (extracted marble blocks, characterized by positive elevation differences) and quarry area management (debris disposal and service infrastructure construction, characterized by negative elevation differences). The combined use of 2D and 3D change indicators can be challenging in order to correctly represent soil consumption over the years. A dual 2D/3D webgis client have been developed for proper representation of 2D/3D spatial indicators of ongoing extraction activities in the Carrara marble basin: high-resolution images have been served as tiled data, while 2D/3D spatial indicators are served as static and/or tiled vector data. Open-Source libraries have used in data processing, serving and representation inside a map interface.