Forensic Geoscience

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue of Geosciences aims to gather high-quality original research articles, reviews and technical notes on the use of geosciences for forensic investigations.Forensic Geoscience may be defined as a subdiscipline of geoscience that is concerned with the application of Earth Sciences information and methods to investigations, which may come before a court of law.

The approach to the crime scene differs by method, quality and purpose depending on whether the operators are investigators, criminologists, forensic experts, clue searching technical experts or criminal profiling specialists. Even the various branches of forensic geoscience require different approaches depending on the purpose for which the technical survey is conducted and the purposes of the investigation. However, regardless of the type of the crime and the manner of intervention, the forensic geoscientist starts from a fundamental approach, common to all the geosciences, which is to study, understand, and interpret the environment and the geographical, physical and geological territory in which the actual crime took place. This is because the forensic geoscientist must be able to search for and collect adequate information from the environment, placing it in its specific criminal context and characterizing its actual or presumed narrative.

The interpretation of the territory in order to search for a presumed burial site is carried out through the use of different instruments, involving both large and small-scale equipment. For example, remote sensing can easily provide valuable information about the area to be investigated and their use in the preliminary stages of a survey can be effective, leading to significant saving of time and energy. On a local scale, geophysical techniques allow a more accurate positioning of the buried target. A correct and careful geological analysis of the local context allows for a more accurate and comprehensive resolution of the case, focusing energy and resources in certain areas of the scene under investigation. Once the site has been identified and mapped, the geo-archaeological excavation can begin, keeping in mind the concept of stratigraphy, the law of superposition and the methodology for a proper recovery.The processing of all this information may be implemented in any geographic information system or GIS (Geographic Information System). In fact, such solutions appear to be way to link together information from different sources such as those described above, which otherwise would be impossible to correlate. The concept of GIS developed with the idea of a "container" capable of handling territorial management issues under the most varied representations, but also able to understand and absorb into a single inter-relational process all the automated procedures and databases associated with a forensic investigation.Therefore, I would like to invite you to submit articles about your recent work, experimental research or case studies, with respect to the above and/or the following topics:·   

• Forensic Geoscience
• Forensic Geology
• Forensic Geophysics
• Forensic Archaeology
• Remote Sensing and GIS in Forensics
• Environmental Forensics
• Ethics and Best Practices in Forensic Geoscience    

I also encourage you to send me a short abstract outlining the purpose of the research and the principal results obtained, in order to verify at an early stage if the contribution you intend to submit fits with the objectives of the Special Issue.

Prof. Lorna Dawson
Dr. Pier Matteo Barone
Dr. Rosa Maria Di Maggio
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• Forensic Geology
• Forensic Archaeology
• Forensic Geophysics
• Remote Sensing
• GIS
• Forensic Pedology
• Forensic Geoscience
• Environmental Forensics
• Crime Scene Investigation