A special-edition multilingual DVD, with easily comprehensible multimedia material in six languages, was produced. The videos include interviews from consortium partners along with multimedia presentations of Earth Observation topics and case studies. The following presentations are part of the multilingual edition:
1. “High Resolution Satellites Images for Urban Planning,” University of Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina
2. “Land cover and Land changes, Urbanization and touristic development pressure and flood risks,” University of Architecture, Civil Engineering and Geodesy, Sofia, Bulgaria
3. “Cultural Heritage,” Istanbul Technical University, Turkey
4. “Disaster Management and Earthquakes,” GeoSat Company for Exploration and Development, Croatia
5. “Web GIS and 3D Cadastral Information,” GISDATA Ltd., Faculty of Transport and Traffic Engineering, University of Belgrade, Serbia
6. “Data standards, regional Earth Observation stakeholders, and National Data Infrastructure Issues,” Sts. Cyril and Methodius University, Faculty for Civil Engineering, Skopje
7. “Environmental Applications and windmill farm Localization,” University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
8. “Landslides, determination of lake depths, Energy savings and Environmental Issues in Urban Environments,” Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Scholl of Rural and Surveying Engineering (Greece).
An example of a case study
Earthquakes and floods are the most devastating natural disasters. The Balkan area, as a part of the Mediterranean region, is seismotectonically the most active part of Europe. Numerous earthquakes occur in this region, most of them with catastrophic results. To depict the areas of the high seismotectonic activity, remote-sensing techniques, particularly satellite images, are very useful for registration of the structural elements that play a role in seismotectonic relations. Geotectonic movements in the Earth’s crust are the major contributors to earthquakes. The results of tectonic movements have been manifested through the geological features of the terrain: faults, folds and ring structures.
The tectonic map of the Western part of the Balkan shows the faults registered on satellite images, as well as the epicentres of large magnitude earthquakes. Most of these earthquakes’ epicentres are located along the large faults or at their intersections, as seen in Banja Luka, Zagreb and Ljubljana. For a detailed seismotectonic exploration, the high-resolution satellite radar images are very useful for the recognition of structural elements, and the intersections of strong faults. The catastrophic earthquake that occurred in Banja Luka in 1969 had its epicenter on the intersection between faults of different orientation
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By Petros Patias, posted on October 1st, 2012 in Articles, Earth Observation