摘要：The use of remotely piloted aerial systems (RPAS) hasshown a strong improvement in last years. Starting from typical applications like archaeology (Koutsoudisa et al., 2014;Mesas-Carrascosa et al., 2016; Lazzari and Gioia, 2017), today these systems are nowadays used in different domainsincluding precision farming (Salamì et al., 2014), architecture (Roca et al., 2013; Dominici et al., 2017), study of natural phenomena (Gomez and Purdie, 2016; Giordan et al.,2017) and their effects (Giordan et al., 2018b), and study ofhuman impact on Earth (Xiang et al., 2018). RPAS equippedwith RGB photo cameras and the development of more efficient photogrammetric techniques (Westoby et al., 2012)had simplified the fast acquisition of a sequence of imagesand they had multiplied the possible uses of these systemsthat are now able to reliably and easily produce a digital surface model and an orthophoto (Nex and Remondino, 2014).These approaches can be very useful for the study of natural hazards, for which an on-demand system able to acquirehigh-resolution image datasets in a limited lapse of time canbe very useful. The availability of a detailed representationof the hazardous natural process or its effects can be an important support for (i) comprehension of the evolution ofthe natural process that could create a hazardous condition,(ii) timely monitoring during emergencies, (iii) residual riskassessment, and (iv) first estimation of occurred damages. Inthis special issue, we selected and published different contributions presented in a thematic session of the EuropeanGeosciences Union General Assembly of 2016 and 2017.
