From Space to Earth—AIRFARE: A Project for the Cultural Heritage Preservation ^†

Preservation of historic monuments and archaeological sites has a strategic importance for maintaining local cultural identity, encouraging a sustainable exploitation of cultural properties and creating new social opportunities. Cultural heritage objectives are often exposed to degradation due to natural and anthropogenic impacts. The main aim of the project AIRFARE is to analyze the conservation and the static condition of structures and sites with high historical heritage relevance in Romania, in order to detect critical phenomena that can lead to their deterioration. The project will design, test and promote responsiveness solutions for effective resilience of cultural heritage sites against three types of risks—human activities, climatic impact and structural instability of buildings and their surroundings. In this scope, specific analysis tools will be used in order to construct a catalogue of products for cultural heritage monitoring, by integrating several advanced techniques, such as Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning and multi-temporal change detection techniques with multi-sensor Earth Observation data. AIRFARE will focus on assessing and mitigating hazards generated both by natural (severe weather, abundant species, sudden and slow developing geological events, etc.) and anthropic processes (urban sprawl, underground works and material extraction, illegal building and deliberate destruction). In addition to free EO data, commercial auxiliary EO data and in-situ determinations will be obtained, in order to best characterize sites and serve in the validation process. Probably one of the key points of the project is the consortium, which brings together the know-how and experience of all technologies relevant to the proposed project. The consortium covers the three key segments applicable to the development of services: the economic operator able to exploit the research results by including them in a commercial solution, a university partner with experience in using satellite Earth observation data for cultural heritage monitoring activities and the partner ICECHIM, with experience in the field of cultural heritage conservation, knowledgeable of users’ requirements and who will ensure the in-situ component of the services. AIRFARE will focus on assessing and mitigating the influence of natural processes (severe weather, abundant vegetation species, geological events of sudden and slow development, climate change, etc.), as well as anthropogenic ones (urbanization, underground works and resource extraction, constructions illegal and deliberate destruction).