Geoinformation Technologies in Support of Environmental Hazards Monitoring under Climate Change: An Extensive Review

Abstract

Human activities and climate change constitute the contemporary catalyst for natural processes and their impacts, i.e., geo-environmental hazards. Globally, natural catastrophic phenomena and hazards, such as drought, soil erosion, quantitative and qualitative degradation of groundwater, frost, flooding, sea level rise, etc., are intensified by anthropogenic factors. Thus, they present rapid increase in intensity, frequency of occurrence, spatial density, and significant spread of the areas of occurrence. The impact of these phenomena is devastating to human life and to global economies, private holdings, infrastructure, etc., while in a wider context it has a very negative effect on the social, environmental, and economic status of the affected region. Geospatial technologies including Geographic Information Systems, Remote Sensing—Earth Observation as well as related spatial data analysis tools, models, databases, contribute nowadays significantly in predicting, preventing, researching, addressing, rehabilitating, and managing these phenomena and their effects. This review attempts to mark the most devastating geo-hazards from the view of environmental monitoring, covering the state of the art in the use of geospatial technologies in that respect. It also defines the main challenge of this new era which is nothing more than the fictitious exploitation of the information produced by the environmental monitoring so that the necessary policies are taken in the direction of a sustainable future. The review highlights the potential and increasing added value of geographic information as a means to support environmental monitoring in the face of climate change. The growth in geographic information seems to be rapidly accelerated due to the technological and scientific developments that will continue with exponential progress in the years to come. Nonetheless, as it is also highlighted in this review continuous monitoring of the environment is subject to an interdisciplinary approach and contains an amount of actions that cover both the development of natural phenomena and their catastrophic effects mostly due to climate change.

Integration of GIS-Based Multicriteria Decision Analysis and Analytic Hierarchy Process for Flood-Hazard Assessment in the Megalo Rema River Catchment (East Attica, Greece)

“…Floods are among the most frequent and dangerous natural hazards and the leading cause of natural disaster fatalities worldwide [1]. They represent approximately one-third of all global hazardous events, and the number of extreme flood incidences has significantly increased over the past few decades [2]. Every year this type of hazard causes a significant loss of life and property [3] and severely affects the natural and human environment as well as the development of an area [4].…”

“…Area (in km2 and percentage) of the catchment in each flood-hazard zone (areas are shown in Figures7 and 8).…”

Development and Application of Water and Land Resources Degradation Index (WLDI)

“…Integrated water resources management contributes to the appropriate use of surface and groundwater, with the goal of meeting the requirements of urban, agricultural, and industrial needs [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13]. Water is in abundance in some regions of the world, while in others (especially in developing countries) water resources may be sometimes scarce due to low rainfall, overpopulation, and lack of water specific infrastructure.…”

Random Forests with Bagging and Genetic Algorithms Coupled with Least Trimmed Squares Regression for Soil Moisture Deficit Using SMOS Satellite Soil Moisture

“…Soil moisture is of key importance in numerous fields from weather, climate, agricultural to hydrological sciences [1]. It is also considered as an Essential Climatic Variable (ECV) in 2010 [2][3][4][5].…”