Remote Sensing of Urban Areas

Lecturer

Hannes Taubenböck
Henri Dubray

ECTS

5 ECTS

 

Aim

Aim of this course is to provide you with an overview on geographic processes of urbanization, the related demographic and structural changes of cities, and data analyses methods using remote sensing data for applications in urban geography.

Content

Humankind is within its largest migration ever: from rural areas into cities. The drivers of this global process of urbanization from demographic to economic and the related  structural changes cities are facing will be discussed in this course. Remote sensing is one crucial data source in this dynamic transformation and its products are highly relevant for urban planning, as well as environmental management. Within this course different approaches and techniques are covered focusing on deriving relevant information about urbanized areas on different levels of detail. Uni-temporal-, multi-temporal-, and time series based image classification, segmentation, the analyses of point patterns, GIS analyses to assess spatial context and dependencies, as well as analyses in the 3D domain will be addressed in this course. This will be done providing and discussing example applications from different regions globally (e.g. urban sprawl analysis of megacities, the development of new dimensions of urban landscapes such as mega-regions, the rearrangement of business districts within the urban landscape, etc.). You will learn what capabilities Earth observation data, methods and products have for urban research and applications and how to design remote sensing based urban analysis, how to avoid caveats, troubleshoot errors and interpret the results.

General Course News and Updates

MSc defense Malin Fischer

MSc defense Malin Fischer

Malin Fischer will present her MSc thesis "Remote sensing and machine learning for irrigation mapping in complex landscapes: a case study in Mozambique" on Wednesday, 10th of November at 9 am. From her abstract: "Analyzing the spatio-temporal distribution of irrigated...

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MSc thesis defense by Florian Baumgartner

MSc thesis defense by Florian Baumgartner

Floran Baumgartner will present his M.Sc. thesis "The potential of Sentinel-2 time series for yield estimation of a perennial wild plant mix-ture using machine learning" on Friday 29th of October at 10am. From the abstract: "Monocultures are generally accompanied by...

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MSc defense by Frederic Schwarzenbacher

MSc defense by Frederic Schwarzenbacher

Frederic Schwarzenbacher will defend his M.Sc. thesis on Monday 6th at 3pm. The title is "Habitat suitability modeling for Desert Locust in the Awash River basin: Estimation of the breeding probability based on remote sensing, climatology and environment data" and...

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MSc defense by Belen Villacis

MSc defense by Belen Villacis

Belen will defend her M.Sc. thesis “Spatio-temporal patterns of urban expansion among main biomes in Ecuador using LULC data from 1990-2018” on Wednesday 8th of September, 2pm. From the abstract: "Over the past decades, the world has experienced an accelerated...

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MSc defense by Ronja Lappe

MSc defense by Ronja Lappe

Ronja Lappe handed in her M.Sc. thesis "Assessing 30 years of coastline dynamics in Vietnam using the Landsat archive"from the abstract: "Almost half of the world’s human population lives in coastal regions, with 40 % less than ten meters above sea level. Due to...

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MSc defense by Martin Koenig

MSc defense by Martin Koenig

Martin König handed in his thesis with the title “Examining post-fire vegetation recovery with Landsat time series analysis in Olympic National Park (USA)”. Martin used remote sensing and ground collected data to make sense of vegetation recovery patterns for larger...

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