Monitoring and assessment of urban environments using space-borne earth observation data

Abstract

Urban sprawl is one of the most dynamic processes in the context of global land use transformations. The rapid urbanization and the enormous dynamics of changes in urban environments involve considerable challenges in terms of observing, analyzing and understand-ing the complex processes forming metropolitan areas. Hence, effective and sustainable urban management increasingly demands alternative concepts and techniques to obtain up-to-date in-formation on the status and development of urban systems. Spaceborne earth observation (EO) has become a promising tool to provide updated geo-information on the location, shape and morphology of built-up areas on various spatio-temporal scales showing therefore the dynamics of urbanization. Also the socio-economic aspects linked to urban environments can be assessed. For each of these application areas we provide an example to demonstrate the applicability and benefits of remote sensing data and techniques in terms of a monitoring and assessment of ur-ban agglomerations. This includes the development of methods for the delineation of urban footprints, the characterization of the urban morphology, the modeling of imperviousness and the assessment of vulnerability and risk.