Drone remote sensing for coastal habitats protection

The growing beach touristic vocation of the Lecce Province has led to increasing human pressures along its coasts over the years, often on habitats of conservation interest. Furthermore, the ever-increasing erosion phenomena of the sandy shoreline constantly requires fast and effective monitoring activities assessing the conservation status of the dunes and shoreline. Remote sensing through the use of RPAS (Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems or Drones) is proving to be very useful for identifying phenomena that act on a small scale and supporting and implementing protective measures according to an adaptive management approach and to favour the creation of a long term investigation model, through multi-year surveys on conservation interest habitats. The photographic data and their photogrammetric elaboration allow to find a specific point, thanks to georeferencing, on which evaluate the evolution of certain phenomena following the analysis by different types of experts able to extract a large amount of data from the same photogrammetric product, this thanks to the possibility of choosing analysis scales from the meter to the centimetre. In recent years this technique has proved to be extremely effective and interesting in the environmental analysis of a multitude of matrices. The present work consists of a protocol for monitoring the dune cordons and the nearby shorelines through the use of RPAS. This kind of survey allows to create a geodatabase with spatially-explicit detailed maps able to provide a useful tool for monitoring overtime the erosive phenomena and/or the anthropic abuses on nature to the detriment of the beach system.