UrbanTEP – Data Products, Processing Capabilities, Data Analytics and Visualization Tools for Urban Monitoring

Kurzfassung

Urbanization and sustainable settlement growth are key global challenges. They are closely linked to the socio-economic development and affect the surrounding environment, as well as health of a majority of the global population. Greenhouse gas emissions of settlement growth related construction activities, as well as of energy and consumable consumption are major contributors to climate change. The changing (mostly warming) climate leads to more extreme and more frequent natural hazards, which put infrastructures, settlements and their inhabitants at risk. Collaborative efforts, tools and information are needed to mitigate negative impacts of settlement growth, to identify locally adapted compromises between the environment and human well-being, as well as to understand how to take advantage of opportunities that arise out site specific settings. Earth observation (EO) information products and other spatial datasets have been successfully used and exploited in this context by many research projects, as well as planning and decision-making processes for making cities more resilient. While most of these activities were based on solitary and effortful processing and visualization solutions, platform-based initiatives have proven to be game changing technologies, which are capable of revolutionizing service provision, workflows and information products. The Urban Thematic Exploitation Platform (UrbanTEP; urban-tep.eu) is a collaborative system, which focuses on the processing of EO and other spatial information products for delivering multi-source information on trans-sectoral urban challenges on various scales. UrbanTEP is developed to provide end-to-end and ready-to-use solutions for a wide spectrum of users (i.a. service providers, expert and non-expert users and researchers) for extracting unique information and products required in the urban context (Esch et al. 2018). The key system components are an open, web-based portal connected to distributed and scalable high-level computing infrastructures and providing key functionalities for: i) high-performance data access and processing (IaaS – Infrastructure as a Service), ii) modular and generic state-of-the art pre-processing, analysis, and visualization tools and algorithms (SaaS – Software as a Service), iii) customized development and sharing of algorithms, products and services (PaaS – Platform as a Service), and iv) networking and communication. The processing, analysis and visualization of EO data in the frame of the New Urban Agenda (NUA) and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) monitoring, specifically the SDG 11 “Sustainable Cities and Communities”, are central aspects of UrbanTEP. Via the concept of the “City Data Cubes” for urban use cases and hosted processing on the DIAS platforms, UrbanTEP offers capabilities to exploit large EO archives (e.g. Copernicus Sentinel missions). EO-based information products support these analyses. The data analytics and visualization capabilities of UrbanTEP provide functionalities for a user-driven derivation of key urban indicators based on the above-mentioned multi-source data collections. These indicators include built-up extent, built-up density, form and centrality, population distribution and population at risk (e.g., to natural hazards), which allows users and service providers to develop globally applicable services for the on-demand calculation and analysis for the monitoring of SDG 11 indicator 11.3.1. One of the products that contributes to the global mapping and monitoring of human settlements is the World Settlement Footprint (WSF), which outlines built-up areas globally, as well as the WSF Evolution product, which provides annual settlement extents and allows analyzing settlement dynamics (Marconcini et al. 2020; Marconcini et al. 2021). In a scalable use case approach in close exchange with UN-Habitat, SDG 11.3.1 products and urban indicators were developed, processed and visualized for Eastern Africa and made available for the interested user community.