Fast detection of significantly transformed areas due to illegal waste burial with a procedure applicable to Landsat images

To identify the areas where there is suspicion of illegal waste burial, a great amount of time is often necessary. As a matter of fact, the detection of suspicious areas is often based on a comparison of available airborne images with high temporal and spatial resolution, and surveys. This is also done to gather significant aspect of change as deep soil reshuffle in small excavation areas. These methods however, take a long time to be applied because large areas have to be analysed within sub-areas. Consequently, there is loss of understanding related to a wider and complete phenomenon that allows us to have information of all the territory that has undergone heavy transformations, especially if due to illegal conduct of waste disposal. As a result, there are no enough data to strategically evaluate how to counteract such illegal activities.

The problem of illegal waste burial is a serious threat to human health and ecosystems. These illegal activities occur most often in areas which have been heavily modified and considered degraded, mainly quarry areas and landfills, even if it is licensed.