Innovators III EO4URBAN

More than half of the people on the planet - roughly 3.5 billon human beings - live in cities. By 2030, the world is expected to add an additional 1.4 billion urban dwellers (United Nations, 2011). As a result, huge areas of arable land, forest, and grassland, as well as numerous water bodies, have been converted to meet strong demand stemming from urbanization and industrial development. Accurate and timely information on the rate and distribution of urbanization around the world is of critical importance to support sustainable urban development.

 

Despite the growing importance of urban land mapping in local, regional to global scale studies, it remains difficult to map globally and systematically urban areas at multi-scales, due to the heterogeneous mix of land cover types in urban environments, and to the cost of commercial airborne and satellite data. With the recent launch of Sentinel-1A and Sentinel-2A, high resolution SAR and optical data with global coverage and free and open data policies are now available, which will allow an operational and reliable global urban land mapping to become routinely available.

 

EO4URBAN will develop novel and innovative approaches for global urban services around Sentinel 1 C-SAR and Sentinel 2 MSI in support to sustainable urban development. The project will evaluate the capacity of multi-temporal multi- resolution S1A C-SAR and S2A MSI data for urban extent extraction and detailed urban land cover mapping and develop effective validation methods for assessing the quality of these innovative global urban mapping products and services. Pilot urban service demonstrators will be developed for 10 cities around the world that represents different urban realities.