AIC's 44th Annual Meeting

The growing availability of high-resolution commercial satellite imagery provides unprecedented capabilities for monitoring around the world, shedding light on events in remote locations. The ability to monitor remotely is of particular need when conflict creates non-permissive environments that result in long-term inaccessibility on the ground. Multiple actors often overlap in space and time and conflicting accounts, often based on incomplete or inaccurate information, can proliferate. When conducted with a rigorous study design, proactive monitoring of cultural heritage sites, utilizing time-series historical analysis, can bring much needed clarity to these situations by providing independent scientific assessments of past events or events in progress.   This presentation will discuss the methods and means being used to systematically monitor cultural heritage sites in Syria using high-resolution satellite imagery. The research identifies and quantifies damage to cultural heritage sites and has developed a method to determine risk to sites based upon a wide variety of geospatial factors, ranging from local military presence to site accessibility. The difficulties encountered while conducting large-scale satellite imagery analysis will be discussed, such as identification of corroborating information, data storage and organization, workflows, and coordinating multi-analyst research.