Approaching Climate Resilience in Greek Cultural Heritage Using Geodata and Geoinformatics Tools

Abstract

The scientific community and policy makers recognize that adaptation and resilience measures and strategies are needed to minimize the impacts of climate change. The incorporation of such strategies into mapping tools will help communities, authorities and stakeholders to manage extreme situations and emergency phenomena such as floods, winds, landslides, sea level rise, etc. Since spatial information is a key factor for any aspect of resilience to climate change and in order to enhance the resilience of cultural assets, it is necessary to adopt a multidimensional approach centered around geospatial information. The modern tools of Geoinformatics (such as Geographical Information Systems, Satellite Remote Sensing, Photogrammetry, Spatial analysis, etc.) are a solution and utility in modern societies for the development of these systems either at a local, regional or global level. They are a complete solution, as they can combine geo-information, including data from the past, from the present and eventually become an approach-predicting model for the future, with many applications and at different scales. Therefore, approaching and modeling the resilience quantitatively, can be defined using appropriate geodata sets (such as Digital Elevation Models-DEMs, hydrological network datasets, meteorological datasets, precision satellite datasets, etc.) combined with the use of Geoinformatics tools and Geographical Information Systems (GIS providing accurate and realistic belief-based estimations and better analysis of resilience indicators (sensitivity, recovery, adaptation, risk). An attempt will be made to study monuments and sites, which are located in special geophysical, soil and climatic areas of the territory and at the same time not so well-known compared to other areas of Greece. A special broader area for specific cultural and archaeological sites is the Volcanic Arc. The area includes the Volcanoes at Sousaki, Methana, Santorini, Milos and Nisyros (of which 3 are active Volcanoes with past eruptions). Along the arc there are important cultural and archaeological sites that need protection and attention mainly because they are exposed to island complexes and coastal areas of particular natural beauty and area.