Ekodenge is a Turkish SME with a team of sustainability experts, providing consultancy, engineering, architecture, and software solution services.

Created in 1996, Ekodenge is headquartered in Ankara, at the Hacettepe Technopark research and business centre. The company can count on a multi-disciplinary team of 40 people, including architects, chemical, environmental and mechanical engineers.

The challenge

Climate change is exposing historical and cultural sites to threats such as floods, wildfires and heatwaves, among others. Data on land cover is critical to understand these hazards, as well as to monitor changes around cultural heritage sites.

Even though spatial information becomes more and more abundant thanks to global Earth Observation (EO) systems, spatial data collected by different entities for different regions of the world still lack standardisation and harmonisation.

Since 2019 Ekodenge is part of the Consortium implementing the Horizon 2020 SHELTER project (Sustainable Historic Environments holistic reconstruction through Technological Enhancement and community-based Resilience). The project involves 23 partners from 10 countries.

SHELTER includes five test beds, representing the main climatic and environmental challenges in Europe and different heritage’s typologies.

Ekodenge is responsible for creating a risk assessment tool visualised on a Geographic Information System (GIS), containing information on land use, that can used to foresee resilience and threats to the heritage and to plan recovery measures. To do this, Ekodenge needs accurate information on land cover in the sites targeted by the project.

The satellite solution

To build the platform for disaster risk management in the areas targeted by the project, Ekodenge uses data on land cover and climate and historical data from the Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 satellites of the Copernicus programme.

The historical data allow them to retrace soil movements, changes in landcover, and weather events, such as heatwaves and floods, that damaged the cultural heritage sites in the past. These data are integrated in the datadriven platform for disasters risk management produced within the project.

The Copernicus data is particularly useful for this kind of assessments, since the data are freely available across Europe and accessible in the same format. This means that the data acquired through Copernicus allow Ekodenge to calibrate all different and site-specific data to be used into the same platform. Moreover, the information contained in the platform for each site can be easily compared and updated.

The results

Thanks to Copernicus data, Ekodenge can acquire data on land cover for the five different areas targeted in the open labs in a harmonised and standardised format.

The platform not only includes information relevant for safeguarding cultural heritage, but also for protecting natural heritage and human settlements from natural disasters and climate change at the regional level.

The GIS platform developed by the partners of the SHELTER project will contribute to building a model to improve the resilience of cultural heritage sites through better decision-making processes and policies applicable at local and regional levels.

All data will be made available on an IT platform after the project ends in 2023. Based on the information regrouped in the platform, the project partners will propose measures to increase the resilience of cultural heritage sites and make recommendations on “building back better” techniques.

The platform is intended to be used by all the stakeholders operating in the sites targeted by the SHELTER project, such as policymakers, fire brigades, construction companies, and research institutes.

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Operating under the authority of the Greek Ministry of Culture, the Ephorate of Antiquities of the Dodecanese is responsible for protecting, preserving, and studying all antiquities in the islands of the Dodecanese.

Rodini was part of the necropolis of the ancient city of Rhodes, in the largest island of the Dodecanese. The area includes the remains of some of the ancient monumental graves and cave sanctuaries, and a park in a valley crossed by a torrent. Shortly before the torrent meets the sea, a bridge built in Roman times is still in use today, being one of the main entry points to the modern city of Rhodes.

The challenge

Soaring temperatures, increasingly frequent floods, summer fires and storms, sea-level rise, and geological movements represent major threats to archaeological remains and historical beauties.

In Rodini, throughout the centuries, summer fires, storms and floods eroded the archaeological remains, which are also severely threatened by land displacements.

Due to the earthquakes, part of the Mausoleum complex in Rodini has collapsed. Another nearby grave complex presents a cracked rock façade, which could cause the crumbling of the grave monuments cut in it. Also the roman bridge, even though statically stable, is presenting fissures on the inner sides of the arches, which makes its monitoring necessary.

To prevent further damage to the monuments in Rodini and to adopt effective conservation measures, the Ephorate needed accurate and up-to-date information on land deformation in the area.

The satellite solution

In 2019, the Ephorate of Antiquities established a collaboration with the National Technical University of Athens, which resulted in their participation in the EU Horizon 2020 HYPERION project.

In Rhodes, HYPERION aimed at recording the damage to the monuments in Rodini that is directly related to the natural environment and the microclimate of the area, at assessing their degree of risk and the rate of their deterioration over time, and at building tools to plan for conservation and restoration measures.

More than 100 Sentinel images from 2016 to 2019 allowed the scientists from the University to create a land deformation map of Rodini and to assess the level of ground deformation in the area. The map shows a 10mm uplift between 2016 and 2019, which clearly affects the structural integrity of the monuments there.

The results

The ground deformation maps classify the level of ground deformation with different colours, and allow users to zoom on specific locations to know how the ground is moving there.

The maps serve as a non-invasive tool to collect the information needed to preserve cultural heritage in Rhodes. The movements are assessed with millimetre accuracy, providing the Ephorate of Antiquities of the Dodecanese with extremely precise data on the structural stress affecting the monuments. This information can be consulted for a specific day or as an annual average.

The Ephorate can identify the structures that need more urgent action and propose measures to secure and restore the monuments. For example, they will take action to stabilise the monuments that are more affected by land deformation in the ancient necropolis in Rodini and will ask the Municipality to stop or lighten the traffic on the Roman bridge.

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