Assessing Vegetation Decline Due to Pollution from Solid Waste Management by a Multitemporal Remote Sensing Approach

Nowadays, the huge production of Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) is one most strongly felt environmental issues. Consequently, European Union (EU) delivers laws and regulations for better waste management, identifying essential requirements disposal operations characteristics that make hazardous to human health environment. In Italy, define, among other things, sites be classified as “potentially contaminated”. From this perspective, Basilicata region currently Italian regions with highest number potentially polluted in proportion inhabitants. This research aimed identify possible effects toxic element (PTE) pollution due activities three contaminated” southern Italy. The area was affected by a release inorganic pollutants values over thresholds ruled national/European legislation. Potential physiological efficiency variations vegetation were analyzed through multitemporal processing satellite images. Landsat 5 Thematic Mapper (TM) 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) images used calculate trend Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) years. trends using median non-parametric Theil–Sen estimator. Finally, Mann–Kendall test applied evaluate significance featuring areas according contamination on investigated vegetation. procedure led exclusion significant PTEs. Thus, during previous years do not seem have significantly around targeted sites.