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

International Day of Women and Girls in Science

International Day of Women and Girls in Science

We would like to celebrate the International Day of Women and Girls in Science with you! It is celebrated annually on February 11th. This day aims to promote full and equal access to science for women and girls, as well as to recognize the achievements of women in...

read more
GRASS GIS introduced in our EAGLE MSc

GRASS GIS introduced in our EAGLE MSc

The very powerful and versatile spatial analysis program, GRASS, is introduced today within our EAGLE spatial data software course. GRASS provides a wide variety of functions, but just a few possibilities such as VI calculation, time-series or Python programming in...

read more
Introduction to Whitebox software

Introduction to Whitebox software

The Whitebox geospatial software offers a wide range of functionality which are partly also not available in other packages, such as hydrological analysis or Lidar processing. Our earth observation EAGLE students are learning diverse geospatial software packages in...

read more
Internship Networking event

Internship Networking event

Our EAGLEs have to conduct two internship and like to do them in quite diverse fields. Their research interests range from dry ecosystems to mountains, from conservation to agriculture, from the Arctic to Africa and from Earth Observation companies to large research...

read more
UAS application in a biosphere reserve

UAS application in a biosphere reserve

Our EAGLE Helena Wehner presented her work in the Rhoen biosphere reserve where she tested the potential of low cost consumer drones for conservation.  She aimed at mapping animal tracks using photogrammetry approaches in snowy landscapes. The structure through...

read more
Online RStoolbox bug code sprint

Online RStoolbox bug code sprint

Our new maintainer, konstantin Mueller, one of our EAGLE students, migrated the remote sensing R package to sf, terra/stars and got it back onto cran. However, as usual various bugs are still around and during our eagle remote sensing programming lecture the youngest...

read more
EAGLEs learn SNAP

EAGLEs learn SNAP

Various very specific scientific software packages are developed to serve specific purposes like the SNAP tools for Sentinel fleet data processing. Our EAGLEs have to learn the wealth of relevant software packages for our field of research and get to know the pros and...

read more
our EAGLEs train SAGA GIS

our EAGLEs train SAGA GIS

Within our EAGLE MSc program our students are learning quite a variety of programming environments and software programs, however due to the high diversity of available (open-source) programs our students have to apply their spatial research skills to learn a totally...

read more