Urban monitoring in support of sustainable cities

Abstract

Nowadays, there is a clear evidence that climate change poses serious challenges to urban areas and their growing population, e.g. increasing occurrence of heat waves, drought, heavy precipitation, cyclones and extreme high sea level events. These changes will affect physical infrastructure, water supply, energy provision, transport and industrial production, hence resulting in a variety of ripple effects across different sectors of the city life. In this context, Earth observation (EO) has proven to be an effective tool for supporting decision makers in facing climate change; nevertheless, gaps still exist between the current state-of-the-art and the users' requirements. The FP7 DECUMANUS project aims at bridging this gap also by a direct strong engagement of city users. In particular, DECUMANUS has a principal objective to develop and consolidate a set of sustainable services that allows city managers to incorporate EO-based geo-spatial products and geo-information services in their climate and environmental change strategies to support the sustainable management of the cities in Europe. In this paper, we present three advanced products generated in the framework of the DECUMANUS land monitoring services, namely spatiotemporal urbanization mapping, imperviousness estimation and settlement patterns analysis. In particular, all of them have been generated according with the requirements of the project users' community and will allow supporting their environmental change adaptation strategies at the district level.