## 1 Introduction  
Over the last two decades, remote sensing of satellite imagery for cultural heritage risk assessment has significantly increased [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. Corroborating evidence of such a growth of interest is found not only in the scientific publications [4, 5], but also in white papers, policy documents and more generally in the grey literature. At the same time, protection and safeguarding of cultural and natural heritage have been raised higher in international agendas (e.g., as a dedicated target in the United Nations' 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development Objective #11.4) and what satellite technologies can specifically do towards this scope is the subject of dedicated reflections, at least at the European level (e.g., Copernicus Cultural Heritage Task Force). The wide range of both multispectral and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellites, together with the open access availability of images through different online platforms, has helped to raise awareness on the potential of this approach and opened up new avenues for cultural heritage and archaeological studies [6, 7, 8, 9]. This type of application, framed within a rich corpus of theoretical analyses and guidelines [10; 11; 12; 13; 14], and integrated with ground-truthing assessment methodologies [15], allows a comprehensive understanding of all the risks and damage to cultural heritage. Despite these major advances, most of the studies focused on selected types of damage, chiefly looting [16; 17; 18], natural hazards [19] and conflict-related [20; 21], that were generally deemed to be the most dangerous ones or were more consistently covered by the increased flow of information and media attention in response to the events occurring in different regions (e.g., Syrian or Libyan civil wars). Beyond the utmost importance of those damages, a growing number of studies [10; 11; 22; 23; 24; 25; 26] has recently demonstrated that other types of hazards such as ploughing, construction of roads and buildings or even large-scale infrastructures, have a comparable impact on cultural heritage despite being less considered by the current literature. Among the various types of large-scale infrastructure projects, dams represent a major issue. Their construction results in flooding (which in most cases still allows underwater archaeology research [27; 28]) or multiple types of damage, including partial or total removal of the archaeological deposits due to erosion by water within the reservoir [29; 30], as well as partial or complete destruction caused by the dams' infrastructures [31]. These types of hazards have affected thousands of archaeological sites in different places around the world [29; 31; 32; 33; 34; 35] (Figure 1A). The numbers are striking and range from about 2000 archaeological sites submerged or damaged by dams built along the Nile river [34; 36] to approximately 1000 sites flooded in the Tigris and Euphrates basin [37; 31], from nearly 1300 sites in the Yangtze river valley [38; 39] to at least 800 sites within the six artificial water reservoirs created along the course of the Missouri river [40] (Figure 1B). Despite these pervasive effects, the main concerns about the impact of dams, both at national and international level, generally regard population displacement [41; 42; 43], environmental impact [44; 45; 46] and geopolitics [47; 48; 49], while specific action protocols, and tailor-made methodologies to document, preserve and monitor this type of damage to cultural heritage, are yet to be codified [31]. In terms of national and international policies, we observe different levels of accuracy and effectiveness of Cultural Heritage Management (CHM) practices. In several countries like the United States of America [40; 50], Portugal [51], Russia [52] and Namibia [53], to name a few across the world, there are national legislations, tools and guidelines recognizing the importance of protecting cultural heritage in the case of dam construction. Similarly, it happens with international governmental bodies such as the EU [54].