Urban Ecosystem Analysis supported by Remote Sensing

The prospected growth in urban population and progressive global warming will put huge pressure on the quality of the environment in densely populated areas. Sustainable development and management of urban areas, especially urban green, is hence crucial to guard the living quality in our future cities. Unfortunately, current policy support tools such as environmental models are not well adapted to the high level of heterogeneity of urban landscapes and would greatly benefit from detailed, multi-temporal, spatially distributed input data provided by remote sensing. This project, therefore, aims at exploring the potential of the combined use of recent multi- and hyperspectral sensors in combination with structural information derived from LiDAR, for detailed, spatially explicit characterization of morphological and (bio)physical properties of the urban environment. Remote sensing derived information on the characteristics of green and built-up areas will be used to improve the parametrisation of urban biophysical models. As such, we strive at improving the operational value of urban ecosystem services related to temperature and water regulation.