Remote Sensing for the Monitoring of UNESCO World Heritage Natural Sites

Natural World Heritage sites face a variety of potential threats including uncontrolled agricultural and urban development, conflicts, natural catastrophes, climate change, excess of tourism, and so on. Currently, only 15% of the 689 World Heritage sites can be examined during one session of the World Heritage Committee regarding the state of conservation and status of endangered sites. The necessary information on each site is also not always objective, complete or standardised. More specifically, the Tropical Forest World Heritage sites are the most difficult to monitor on a regular basis due to their extent, the poor accessibility and the lack of technical expertise in many developing countries. In this context, space technologies could help provide a solution particularly for natural heritage sites by providing regular information on sites status and help the World Heritage Committee session to concentrate only on those sites which present particular issues, problems or threat.

This research proposes to provide an overall assessment about conservation in World Heritage sites using land cover change detection from satellite observation. The methodology and processing chain target an automatic detection of forest and land cover change on regular basis as support to the Periodic reporting exercise. Based on various recent developments in object-based change detection and automated land cover classification, the currently available algorithms and methods are adjusted to process large areas using high resolution imagery. The method is tested on 12 sites for prototyping and demonstration purposes. The fitness to use will be assessed with the UNESCO team and the local stakeholders before design of a monitoring system to insure the monitoring over the next 10 years.