Abandoned quarries surveying

The quarry activities are subjected in Italy to regional regulations that foresee the obligation to restore the site at the end of the activity. Nevertheless, since these regulations have been implemented after the 1980s, several quarries remain without any kind of restoration. However, such sites evolved naturally from a situation of not equilibrium with the surrounding ecosystem, toward a new situation of equilibrium through dynamic processes of soil formation and plants and animals colonization. The aim of this work is to point out a monitoring methodology in order to determine the state of restoration of abandoned quarries as to survey the land and its evolution in the time and, therefore, to program suitable restoration projects. The adopted monitoring methodology consists of remote-surveyed images, analyzed through GIS systems, and correlated with data collected in situ. The methodology has been applied to abandoned quarries in the Lazio region in Italy. The image analysis has allowed selecting two normalized artificial spectral fractions able to effectively discriminate the naked rock (initial state) from the undisturbed vegetation (final state), as well as the evolution from the initial state to another. Moreover, suitable indicators have been extracted for each quarry in order to describe the state of the situ-restoration and soil evolution. The state of restoration of the analyzed quarries results correlated to the value of the two select normalized artificial spectral fractions.