Combination of Landsat 8 and Sentinel 1 data for the characterization of a site of interest. A Case Study: the Royal Palace of Caserta

In this paper a very recent application ofremote sensing techniques to the investigation of arche-ological sites is discussed. In the last two decades non-invasive techniques have been preferred to old and lessmodern operations like excavations and corings thathave appeared to be risky, expensive, too invasive andvery time-consuming. At this end, objective of this pa-per is to present new added-value tools by the integra-tion of different satellite platforms: data from NASALandsat-8 and ESA Sentinel-1 have been used and com-bined. Since the two systems are very different, theirdata combination provides useful and interesting re-sults. Data from optical/multispectral sensors and datafrom SAR are processed and integrated to monitor andidentify not only the cultural heritage monuments butalso the surrounding vegetation, and the green areasand parks inside. Satellite images can put in evidenceboundaries modifications, vegetation state, their degra-dation, and other phenomena, such as changes in theterritories due both to natural and to anthropogeniccauses. The Royal Palace of Caserta has been chosenas case study: the site in fact by presenting besides thecentral building a huge extension of parks and foun-tains has appeared to be suitable to our aims.