Workshops explore use of satellite imagery and modeling to examine global urbanization
Satellite image of Phoenix
The world’s population increasingly lives in cities, and developing nations in particular are expected to experience rapid urban growth. The growth of cities represents one of the most significant alterations humans have made to the earth, but our ability to forecast the environmental impacts of these land use changes is limited. How can modeling and analysis of remotely-sensed imagery help us monitor these transformations?
On April 1-3, 2011, an international group of experts visited ASU to explore this question. The researchers were joined by Arizona decision-makers and government planners, bringing together scientific and real-world concerns.
ASU geography professors Elizabeth Wentz and Soe Myint, along with Karen Seto of Yale University, ASU’s Michail Fragkias and Maik Netzband of Ruhr University organized the gathering. “The mix of participants in our workshop allowed us to explore ways that remote sensing technology is capable of providing local decision-makers with answers to questions they face daily,” explains Dr. Wentz. “For example, a planner may want to know whether a tree planting and replacement program has been effective at cooling night-time temperatures. Remotely sensed images taken before the program was established through to the present could help answer this question and justify the continuation of the program to budget planners and the general public.”
The gathering was organized as two joint workshops, one focusing on Urban Remote Sensing (URS) and the second on Forecasting Land Use Change (FORE). FORE participants had special expertise in urban growth modeling, while URS participants brought expertise in applying remote sensing to urban analysis. The groups met both separately and jointly. Their discussions focused on the challenges associated with urbanization as well as the capabilities of remote sensing technology and forecasting tools.
A central question was how the capabilities of remote sensing and modeling could be better integrated into city planning and management. Focusing on remote sensing, participants noted that while data are abundant, it’s not always easy to locate the “right” data for a particular purpose. In addition, software for handling remote sensing data is often expensive and difficult to use for the non-expert.
The two groups (URS and FORE) agreed on the value of several efforts: The first is to improve the accessibility of data by non-expert users, by developing web-based tools for acquiring and working with imagery, using an open-source approach where multiple developers can contribute to building powerful and usable software. A second is to work at creating data archives that store imagery from a variety of sources, for a variety of dates. Finally, they agreed that researchers need to study regions in depth, but also need to develop a theoretical framework to tie these case studies together.
“Bringing these groups together generated a momentum in a way that a narrower group couldn’t have done,” says Wentz.
The URS workshop was funded by the National Science Foundation, and organized by Maik Netzband from Ruhr-University in Bochum, Germany, as well as Wentz and Myint of ASU’s School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning. FORE was sponsored by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and organized through Urbanization and Global Environmental Change (UGEC ) and led by Karen Seto of Yale University and Michail Fragkias of UGEC and ASU.
To learn more about the workshop and related efforts:
- URS/FORE Workshop web site
- Urbanization and Global Environmental Change (UGEC) core project
- Understanding the Drivers and Consequences of Global Urbanization using Emerging Remote Sensing Technologies”, Earthzine, September 30, 2011
Participants in URS/FORE workshops (courtesy UGEC)
