New Opportunities for Urban Land Governance by Exploiting Big Data from Earth Observation

Abstract

Modern Earth Observation (EO) satellite missions provide valuable opportunities to address the information needs of land governance and land use planning by delivering dedicated data on the status and spatiotemporal development of the land surface – from global down to local scale, and from urban environments to rural settings. Nowadays, satellite missions such as the US Landsat program or the European fleet of Sentinel satellites collect terabytes of high resolution imagery per day in a temporal and spatial coverage that opens up so far unprecedented possibilities for topographic mapping and environmental monitoring. But at the same time the analysis of this ‘big data from space’ requires new enabling technologies to effectively access, process, analyze and finally transform of the raw image data into ready-to-use thematic and actionable information for decision makers. Here, this contribution introduces latest developments and results of corresponding research activities that range from global mapping activities down to local applications at municipal level.