Urban Planning
The rapid development and growth of urban areas are putting increased pressure on the environment including green spaces and urban parks. Green spaces including street landscapes, lawns, public park areas, gardens, crops, and forests are needed to improve the urban areas and to provide a quality of life to the population. Vegetation offers oxygen and reduces energy demands on the environment and enhances views with a natural environment. The use of GIS data and satellite imagery to manage and monitor green spaces is crucial to improving urban environments and plays an important role to life all around us.
The use of medium or high-resolution satellite imagery can support urban developers and land managers to monitor and support decision-making for sustainable urban development in dense urban environments with changes that require high-resolution detail gathering strategic planning information pertaining of urban planning and development.
Satellite image data provides detailed analysis for creating or updating GIS maps and detecting major changes in urban land cover and land use which allows for frequent coverage and overlaying of different time sequences to classify environmentally safe and sustainable areas for the proposed development area (s).
GIS maps and satellite imagery supports:
- Updating information on road networks and other urban infrastructure
- Collection and analysis of data on population density, distribution, and growth
- Preparation of housing typologies
- Analysis of watersheds
- Landscape development
- 3D modeling
- Infrastructure modeling
- Environmental impact assessment
- Carbon footprint
High and Medium Resolution Satellite Imagery
The satellite sensors deliver 16-Bit 4-Band (B,G,R,N) or 8-Band (C,B,G,Y,R,RE,N,N2) multispectral pixel resolutions from 1.2m to 5m. Pansharpened vegetation indices can be delivered with a resolution of 30cm, 40cm, or 50cm, providing great detail for vegetation and environmental analysis for urban planning and development.
High-resolution stereo satellite sensors, such as GeoEye-1, WorldView-2, WorldView-3, WorldView-4, and the Pleiades Neo satellite constellation can provide a variety of geospatial data for analysis of vegetation and green spaces for the development of sustainable urban areas. WorldView and Pleiades satellites provide a high-resolution panchromatic band of eight (8) multispectral bands; four (4) standard colors (red, green, blue, and near-infrared), and four (4) new bands (coastal, yellow, red edge, and near-infrared), full-color images for enhanced spectral analysis and mapping applications
The use of medium resolution satellite imagery such as Landsat-8, Sentinel-2, and SPOT proved to benefit in the analysis of changes in the vegetation and environment from different years or time periods during the same season which helps to analyze the change that occurred in the past to making the decision on moving forward with planning and development of urban areas.
